As Mistress of Ceremonies your humble servant is a rather watery success. You know from sad experience my fatal fondness for trying new and startling experiments and also my genius for leaving the most important things undone. Remember the time I was Lemonade Committee when we climbed Windy Hill and I carefully provided water and sugar and spoons and glasses, and no lemons? And the time I hid the unwashed dishes in the oven at Aunt Anna’s and then went home with Gladys and forgot all about them, and Aunt Anna nearly had spasms because she thought her silverware had been stolen? And the time we went to Ellen’s Isle and I mislaid the vital portion of my traveling suit half an hour before the train started and had to go in a borrowed suit that didn’t fit? Every time little Katherine was given something to do she either forgot to do it altogether, or else did it in such a way as to make herself ridiculous.
The memory of all those things rose up and oppressed me after I had undertaken to stage a Patriotic Pageant for the township of Spencer. I was so afraid I would do something that would turn it into a farce that I began to have nightmares the minute I sank to weary slumber. It was a daring idea, this patriotic pageant. Since history began there had never been a pageant, patriotic or otherwise, in this section. Most of the folks had never seen a circus, or a show, or a parade; so there was nobody to give me any help except Justice. I myself would never have thought of tackling it, but no sooner had my Camp Fire Girls gotten absorbed in Red Cross work, and been thrilled by reading accounts of what Camp Fire Girls were doing in other sections, than they begged me to get up a pageant. I had my misgivings, but, being a Winnebago, I couldn’t back out. A pageant it should be, if it cost my head. (It pretty nearly did, but not in the way I had feared.)
Justice Sherman hailed the plan with delight.
“Go to it,” he encouraged. “I’m with you to the bitter end. I’ve never done it before but I’ll never begin any younger.
“‘There is a tide in the affairs of schoolma’ams,
That, taken at the flood, leads on to Pageants.’
“Lead on MacDuff! Trot out the order of events.”
At Justice’s suggestion I summed up all the possibilities.
“There isn’t much to work with,” I said thoughtfully, having counted up all my assets on the fingers of one hand. “Just ten Camp Fire Girls, about as many boys, one trick mule, and—you.”
“So glad I know, right at the outset, just where I come in,” said Justice politely, “after the mule.”