grimly in tiny hands two thousand tiny flags of freedom, God’s small angels, and surely there for God knows what far-off event, began to move into the hollow. Their teachers nursed them gently into action, with tapping feet and palms.
“One, two, THREE, four. One, two, THREE, four. Quickly, children!”
A hidden orchestra, musical in the trees, greeted them, as they approached, with holy strains: the Baptists, with the simple doctrine of “It’s the Old-time Religion”; the Methodists, with “I’ll Be Waiting at the River”; the Presbyterians, with “Rock of Ages,” the Episcopalians, with “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”; and rising to lyrical climactic passion, the little Jews, with the nobly marching music of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
They passed without laughter. There was a pause.
“Well, thank God for that!” said Ralph Rolls coarsely in a solemn quiet. The Bard’s strewn host laughed, rustled noisily into line.
“Sh-h! Sh-h!” hissed Miss Ida Nelson.
“What the hell does she think she is?” said Julius Arthur, “a steam valve?”
Eugene looked attentively at the shapely legs of the page, Viola.
“Wow!” said Ralph Rolls, with his accustomed audibility. “Look who’s here!”
She looked on them all with a pert impartial smile. But she never told her love.
Miss Ida Nelson caught the doctor’s stealthy sign. Carefully, in slow twos, she fed them down to him.
The Moor of Venice (Mr. George Graves), turned his broad back upon their jibes, and lurched down with sullen-sheepish grin, unable to conceal the massive embarrassment of his calves.
“Tell him who you are, Villa,” said Doc Hines. “You look like Jack Johnson.”
The town, in its first white shirting of Spring, sat on the turfy banks, and looked down gravely upon the bosky little comedy of errors; the encircling mountains, and the gods thereon, looked down upon the slightly larger theatre of the town; and, figuratively, from mountains that looked down on mountains, the last
