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Up like a centaur he bounds against the sky line, up after him the long rank of ragged hat brims and blue-shirted, broad-belted, manly forms, up the plunging line of hard-tugging bays, their black tails streaming in the morning wind, and then Cranston's arm flings up aloft; up into plain view streams and flaps the silken guidon, the stars and stripes in swallow-tailed miniature that the troopers loved to see, and then the thud gives way to thunder, for as one man "C" troop strikes the gallop with the thronging Indian village not five hundred yards ahead.
These habitations seemed entirely deserted, and several of them were ruinous. The central hut, which represented the pavilion of the leader, was distinguished by his swallow-tailed pennon, placed on the point of a spear, from which its long folds dropped motionless to the ground, as if sickening under the scorching rays of the Asiatic sun.
In that short walk through the streets of Delft I met some gloomy figures like those I had noticed at Rotterdam, without being able to determine whether they were priests, magistrates, or gravediggers, for in their dress and appearance they bore a certain resemblance to all three. They wore three-cornered hats, with long black veils which reached to the waist, swallow-tailed black coats, short black breeches, black stockings, black cloaks, buckled shoes, and white cravats and gloves, and they held in their hands sheets of paper bordered with black. My companion explained to me that they were called aanspreckers, an untranslatable Dutch word, and that their duty was to bear the information of deaths to the relatives and friends of the defunct and to make the announcement through the streets. Their dress differs in some particulars in the various provinces and also according to the religious faith of the deceased. In some towns they wear immense hats
Coats with high collars and with no collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and with the waist at every point between the hip and the armpit; pantaloons of a dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the humiliations of the wearer before his lady-love in short, we were a living epitome of defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment of men who had seen better days.
A long-legged person in a swallow-tailed coat, a provincial lion, with monocle and curled hair, mail clerk or something like it, looking like the comic figure of a Danish novel in the flesh, seemed to be the manager of the festivities and director of the ball.
It was very strange nothing like it ever happened in those mild little books with marbled backs, and with pictures in them of men with swallow-tailed coats and bell-crowned hats, and pantaloons that are short in the legs, and women with the waists of their dresses under their arms, and no hoops on. Nothing like it in any of the Sunday-school books.
The thrill of anticipation was in Cynthia's blood, and the flush of pleasure on her cheeks, when they stopped at last under the sheds. The conductor snapped his fingers and cried, "This way, Judge," and there was Jethro in his swallow-tailed coat and stove-pipe hat awaiting them.
One summer I watched the larvæ of the swallow-tailed butterfly through their different stages, and reserved two chrysalides to develop into the perfect insect. In due time one of these fairy-like creatures came out. I placed it in a small Indian cage, made of fine threads of bamboo. A carpet of soft moss and a vase of flowers in the centre made a pleasant home for my tiny "Psyche."
He was surprised at Paul's cleverness at drawing, and for the first time in his life saw that he cut a ridiculous figure wearing that long, loose, swallow-tailed coat, with great, flaming brass buttons, and resolved upon the spot that his next coat should be a frock, and that he would get a longer pair of pants.
To speak plainly, the fellow had, in spite of his grinning, an audacious and sinister kind of face; and as he curvetted right into the village, the old stumpy appearance of his pumps excited no little suspicion; and many a burgher who beheld him that day would have given a trifle for a peep beneath the white cambric handkerchief which hung so obtrusively from the pocket of his swallow-tailed coat.
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