The streets were gay, and crowded with dolls of all sorts except those made of wax. A good deal of interest was aroused by the little procession, with the six palace guards bringing up the rear. Gradually a crowd of dolls gathered and walked with them, so that the streets became rather full, and the dolls who were driving the toy hansom cabs, and the toy motors, and the toy carts, had some difficulty in making their way along.
The Lord Chancellor seemed to enjoy the attention that was being drawn to them, but also to be a little anxious about being recognized. He called his secretary to him, and said, “You might just tell some of the people that the elderly gentleman in the velvet gown, with a learned and amiable expression of face, is the Lord Chancellor. Then they will hand it on to the others. We will go into this shop and buy some pot-plants.”
They went into a flower-shop, full of toy flowers in very bright red pots, and the Lord Chancellor made a handsome purchase, and paid for it with toy money, which Peggy thought most fascinating. She wished she had brought some of hers with her, for she had had a lot given to her for a Christmas present, and would have been quite rich with it in Toyland. The pots were given to the guards to carry, and they said good-bye to the nice pleasant woman doll who kept the shop, and set out again.
While they had been in the shop, the Lord Chancellor’s secretary had been telling everybody who they were, and also that they were all on their way to prison. He had not been told to say this, but he was rather stupid. The only reason why he was kept on was that he was so willing. But this time he had been a little too willing, for a lot of the doll people were inclined to be angry at so much sending to prison, and some of them thought that the Lord Chancellor could have stopped it if he had liked.
So when they all came out of the shop, there were not quite so many smiles for them as before, and there were even a few boos and hisses as they continued on their way.
The Lord Chancellor looked surprised and pained. “Now I did think that when they were told who I was they would be pleased,” he said. “I must say that I do like people to like me, and it makes me positively miserable if they don’t. What can I have done? There isn’t a smut on my nose, or anything like that, is there?”
“No,” said Wooden. “There is only a small pimple that people might mistake for a smut if they were a little short-sighted.”
“Ah, then I expect that is it,” said the Lord Chancellor. “That pimple has been growing lately, and I always feared that it would bring me trouble.”
Peggy now began to be a little frightened, for the crowd of dolls was pressing more closely round them, and the hisses and the booing were beginning to get louder. Many of the dolls looked angry, too, and she found that it was one thing to laugh at a single chess king being angry, and quite another to have several hundred dolls as large as life jostling round her in a crowd.