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"You're to dress and come on deck." "Eh?" says I. "Have we been U-boated or Zepped? All right; I'll be there in two minutes." And I finds Vee costumed businesslike in a middy blouse and khaki skirt, stowin' things away in a picnic hamper. "What's the plot of the piece?" I asks, yawny. "Auntie and Mr. Ellins haven't come back yet," says she. "It's after three o'clock. Something must have happened."
He was a young man apparently about four or five and twenty and costumed as a backwoods hunter; that is, he wore a buckskin hunting-shirt, leggings, and mocassins with bullet-pouch and powder-horn suspended over his shoulder, and hunting-knife sheathed in his belt.
He will drop fishing words to other gazers, will try to overhear whispered remarks, will sidle towards any jockey-legged or ecurial costumed individual, and aim more especially at getting into the good graces of the betting-office keeper, who, when his business is slack, comes forth from behind the partition and from the duties of the pigeon-hole, to stretch his legs and hold turf-converse.
Nancy was costumed as a "drummer girl" a brilliant uniform with knee skirt, long boots, a little, round, "Tommy Atkins" cap with chin-strap, and a little snare-drum at her hip that she really learned to beat. The big hall was cleared for dancing and decorated by the girls themselves with the loot of the autumn woods.
Of this we need no demonstration, and the testimony of our senses suffices. We have seen the excitant, and it is like a friend who should pass before us in disguise so well costumed and made up that we can attribute to his real self nothing of what we see of him, but yet we know that it is he. And, in fact, let us remember what it is that we have argued upon viz. on an observation.
The students of the Montparnasse Quarter consider it swell and will have none of it. The Latin Quarter, from the Luxembourg, its northern frontier, sneers at its respectability and regards with disfavour the correctly costumed students who haunt it. Few strangers go into it.
But as for that, the princess lady herself did not quite understand either. Perhaps the sight of little Maggie and her play lady friends so elegantly costumed for their social function had suddenly convinced her that these children of the Flats were of her world after all. Perhaps the shouting children had awakened memories that banished for the moment the sadness of her grown-up years.
As we sat at mid-day at the five-storied pagoda, which from a corner of the outer wall overlooks the Tartar city, and ever since, through this crowded week, I have wished that the sun would stand still in the cloudless sky, and let me dream of gorgeous sunlight, light without heat, of narrow lanes rich in color, of the glints of sunlight on embroideries and cloth of gold, resplendent even in the darkness, of hurrying and colored crowds in the shadow, with the blue sky in narrow strips high above, of gorgeous marriage processions, and the "voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride," of glittering trains of mandarins, of funeral processions, with the wail of hired mourners clad in sackcloth and ashes, of the Tartar city with its pagodas, of the hills of graves, great cities of the dead outside the walls, fiery-red under the tropic blue, of the "potter's field" with its pools of blood and sacks of heads, and crosses for crucifixion, now, as on Calvary, symbolical of shame alone, of the wonderful river life, and all the busy, crowded, costumed hurry of the streets, where blue banners hanging here and there show that in those houses death has stilled some busy brains forevermore.
The struggles which he endured to conceal the approaches of decay did but accelerate that decay. He was restless, and again lethargic. Dropsical symptoms appeared in his discolored feet and swollen ankles. Still he insisted every day upon seeing his ministers, and exhibited himself padded, and rouged, and costumed in the highest style of art.
My short visit has been mainly occupied with the day at the Colonial Secretary's Lodge, and in walking and driving through the streets. The city is ablaze with color and motley with costume. The ruling race does not show to advantage. A pale-skinned man or woman, costumed in our ugly, graceless clothes, reminds one not pleasingly, artistically at least, of our dim, pale islands.
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