A long and useful life.
The machinery of the pageant was beautiful and simple.
Its author — Dr. George B.
Rockham, at one time, it was whispered, a trouper with the Ben Greet players — had seen to that.
All the words had been written by Dr. George B.
Rockham, and all the words, accordingly, had been written for Dr. George B.
Rockham.
Dr. George B.
Rockham was the Voice of History.
The innocent children of Altamont’s schools were the mute illustrations of that voice.
Eugene was Prince Hal.
The day before the pageant his costume arrived from Philadelphia.
At John Dorsey Leonard’s direction he put it on.
Then he came out sheepishly before John Dorsey on the school veranda, fingering his tin sword and looking somewhat doubtfully at his pink silk hose which came three quarters up his skinny shanks, and left exposed, below his doublet, a six-inch hiatus of raw thigh.
John Dorsey Leonard looked gravely.
“Here, boy,” he said. “Let me see!”
He pulled strongly at the top of the deficient hose, with no result save to open up large runs in them.
Then John Dorsey Leonard began to laugh.
He slid helplessly down upon the porch rail, and bent over, palsied with silent laughter, from which a high whine, full of spittle, presently emerged.
“O-oh my Lord!” he gasped.
“Egscuse me!” he panted, seeing the boy’s angry face.
“It’s the funniest thing I ever —” at this moment his voice died of paralysis.
“I’ll fix you,” said Miss Amy.
“I’ve got just the thing for you.”
She gave him a full baggy clown’s suit, of green linen.
It was a relic of a Hallowe’en party; its wide folds were gartered about his ankles.
He turned a distressed, puzzled face toward Miss Amy.
“That’s not right, is it?” he asked.
“He never wore anything like this, did he?”
Miss Amy looked.
Her deep bosom heaved with full contralto laughter.
“Yes, that’s right! That’s fine!” she yelled.
“He was like that, anyway.
No one will ever notice, boy.”
She collapsed heavily into a wicker chair which widened with a protesting creak.
“Oh, Lord!” she groaned, wet-cheeked.
“I don’t believe I ever saw —”
The pageant was performed on the embowered lawns of the Manor House.
Dr. George B.
Rockham stood in a green hollow — a natural amphitheatre.
His audience sat on the turf of the encircling banks.
As the phantom cavalcade of poetry and the drama wound down to him, Dr. George B.
Rockham disposed of each character neatly in descriptive pentameter verse.
He was dressed in the fashion of the Restoration — a period he coveted because it understood the charms of muscular calves.
His heavy legs bulged knottily below a coy fringe of drawer-ruffles.
Eugene stood waiting on the road above, behind an obscuring wall of trees.
It was rich young May.
“Doc” Hines (Falstaff) waited beside him.
His small tough face grinned apishly over garments stuffed with yards of wadding.
Grinning, he smote himself upon his swollen paunch: the blow left a dropsical depression.