Ragged Lady, Part 1

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

ry, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations. He would not allow the waitresses

r of slippers for the Spirit of Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have her spoiled. But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could not go, and why. They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched. It remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray's festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail. She went away disa

or four inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long. She looked at the address again, "Miss Clementina Claxon," and at the narrow notched ribbon which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrap

such flattery of fortune could not be honestly meant. But it went to her head, and she was so giddy with it as she caug

back, but they were of the same age in their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes. Mrs. Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade. Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months ha

Boss's luck. He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that took her bet

he said, "Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin! Who do you suppose sent them?" she entreated

ve a pootty good gues

hem to him, and he listened

ust told yo

said. Just that way; and he couldn'

ked him abo

and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr

r droop of one eye. "And he didn't know whe

t, but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say, and see

ill there. "Oh! Oh, yes! Who d' I think? Why, I k

n! If you knew how

guess I won't say anything moa. But if I was in youa place

I do i

hat he don't know ain't wo'th knowin', and I guess nobody else k

se it might not be true, but because she would not have it true. Her head drooped; she turned limp and springless away. Even t

er, too late, "I ain't go

ent to her room, and sat down in the growing

limbed to the chamber where she thought she ought to

en at sight of the dim figure she broke off: "Why, Clem! What's the ma

ementina answered,

'! Why th

twell. Don't ask me! Te

t's happened, Clementina Claxon!" Clementina suffered the woful truth to be draw

g I thought of, and the chef wouldn't

him such a goin' ova, for his teasin', as he ain't had in one whil

bit well, Mrs. Atwell! M

it-and he no business to-why don't you just go to the dance, in 'em,

y eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun to find, since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the management of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither servant nor lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it, without sorrow to hers