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Updated: July 7, 2025
The tiny, dressed-up Oriental dolls boy and girls who strolled about with pink balloons or butterfly kites, in the short intervals between "Mellican" school and Chinese school, were not baby-actors playing parts on the stage, but real flesh and blood children, who had no idea that they were odd to look at in their gay-coloured gowns and tiny caps.
But on this bright April day when we enter the plain of Armageddon, everything is tranquil and joyous. The fields are full of rustling wheat, and bearded barley, and blue-green stalks of beans, and feathery kirsenneh, camel-provender. The peasants in their gay-coloured clothing are ploughing the rich, red-brown soil for the late crop of doura.
But the shout: "Praised be He who has come to-day!" never ceased the whole day. When he entered the forecourt of the Temple and looked in. He stood still in dismay. It was full of life and movement. Hundreds of people of all kinds were tumbling over each other's heels, in gay-coloured coats, in hairy gowns, with tall caps and flat turbans.
It was an ideal place for the thrilling sport for there were a number of high places where experts could take high jumps, and lower slopes in plenty for the learners and the more timid, and great snowy fields beyond where the whiteness was broken by the gay-coloured caps and scarves of tobogganers and skaters.
Parrots in gay plumage filled the air with shrill cries, while here and there herds of antelopes were visible, who, however, always dashed away in rapid flight, in which their strange manner of springing from all fours in the air afforded a most strange and delightful spectacle. On the third day a gay-coloured cavalcade crossed the path of the detachment.
The king's dress on grand occasions was a crown of gay-coloured feathers, and a sort of Scotch kilt of the same material, with a cloak over his shoulder. The queen also wore a petticoat, and so did little Chickchick, but not a rap else, nor did they seem to think it was necessary. The king's name was Rumfiz, and her majesty was called Pillow.
Such ribbons and owches, such gay-coloured rags and blazing tatters, would they assume, and to the Trips and Rounds played to them by some Varlet of a black fiddler, with his hat at a prodigious cock, and mounted on a Tub, like unto the sign of the Indian Bacchus at the Tobacconist's, would they dance and stamp and foot it merrily with plenty of fruit, salt fish, pork, roasted plantain, and so forth, to regale themselves withal, not forgetting punch and sangaree quite forgetful, poor mercurial wretches, for the time being of Fetters and the Scourge and the Driver that would hurry them to their dire labour the morrow morn.
He saw her all the more vividly after looking at the thoughtless faces and gay-coloured dresses of the young women just as one feels the beauty and the greatness of a pictured Madonna the more when it has been for a moment screened from us by a vulgar head in a bonnet.
On an open space near the river, about twenty boys were playing at a game something like what we call "prisoner's base;" their ornaments of beads and brass wire and their gay-coloured kerchiefs and waist-cloths showing to much advantage, and forming a very pleasing sight.
The curate sat on a roughly-made but comfortable garden sofa, and was knitting on a strong stocking in sweet composure. A gay-coloured parallelogram stared out from the grass beside him; for there, covered with a patchwork quilt, lay, in a great basket, the baby, the little girl, the pride of the household, fast asleep.
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