Ragged Lady, Complete

ountain region had decided to compete in a coaching parade, and to rival by their common glory the splendor of the East Side and the West Side parades. The boarding-houses were

ed the entrance to the main street at Middlemount Centre

, and then she said that the Middlemount House must take the prize from them all this year, or she should never come near his house aga

s to the kind of dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and when the time came she had all the yo

ublic she was overwhelmed by disaster. The crowning glory of her composition was to be a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the character of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers, and invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided as to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to the gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months. It had been all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the Spirit of Summer, who had been chosen for the inof

and the position can be regarded as a kind of public function, anyhow. I can't say that I've hi

implication as the question of the child's creation. "She has got to be dressed new from

eranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them. She herself mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside the landlord, who in coachman's dress, with a bouquet of autumnal flowers in his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of his six horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the parade set out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it. They were all to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and festooned in flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of the young swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade. The coach itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined itself as a wheeled vehicle

der was taken away; the landlord spoke to his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid

route, so as to pass as many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives of its people; and what

the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday processional to sacrifice to their gods. Words of fierce Hebrew poetry burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time and place in a dream of days when t

dlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and M

m with applause as far beyond the village borders as wind and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped off breathless before they reached a half-finished house in the edge of some woods. A line of little children was drawn up by the road-side before it, who watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the Middlemount coach came in full sight. Then they sprang into the air, and beating their hands together, screamed, "Clem! Clem! Oh it's Clem!" and jumped up and down, and a shabby looking work worn wom

torted in abated voice. "Th

that

he conna? That

re to keep the spring and summer months from going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and

. Milray, who wanted to go and lie down, too, ask

like my waving to the children, when you saw ho

the rest s

But I don't care! I shoul

she could indulge a generous emotion. She caught the girl in