So they went inside their cosy caravan and ate lunch.
CHAPTER XV
HANDLING THE CROWD
The sun was just poking through the mist and conjuring the beady particles of moisture into tiny jewels when our heroes with their rather bedraggled outfit moved triumphantly up the main street of Snailsdale Manor to the village square. It seemed as if the great orb had deliberately waited to make an effective entrance into the festivities.
Since Pee-wee’s float was the only one which had come from a distance, the others had escaped the blighting effects of long exposure and they formed a carnival of originality and color as they stood clustered on the green, waiting to be drawn into line.
Some were motor driven, as the express vehicles and the buses, but most of them were drawn by horses.
Every auto in the village (and nine tenths of them were Fords) was decorated and filled with city folk in holiday spirit and attire. Wheelbarrows and bicycles, too, were pressed into service. Youths on draped stilts strutted about, waiting. A thriving business was going on in candy and lemonade. Flags and hotel pennants were everywhere. One bicycle with a bathtub conveyance beside it was occupied by a child in the briefest of bathing customs, waving soap and towel.
It must be confessed that the irrepressible Pee-wee felt a little chagrin amid this motley assemblage. Poor Simon was visibly flustered and ill at ease. Our hero beheld all about him designs and color schemes and rolling architectural conceptions which put his modest caravan to shame. Even Hope’s tasteful draping, now wilted and heavy with moisture, did not redeem the grotesque van from a certain amateur crudeness that stuck out all over it. It had looked very fine in the Goodale barnyard, but now, alas, among that galaxy of art and ingenuity supported by free expenditure poor Pee-wee’s much flaunted float seemed cheap and rough and commonplace. His boasted luck seemed at last to have deserted him; he was even subdued by the consciousness of failure, as he gazed wide-eyed at the festive scene all about him.
Almost ashamed, his eyes sought out the float of the Snailsdale House, and there it was, a veritable rolling lawn, with his faithless partner lying in a hammock strung between two imitation trees. There were several children on the float, too, and ladies playing cards and Straw-hat Braggen (apparently faithless to his flivver) was there in all his glory.
Hope jumped down and came tripping over to greet the boys from the farm. “I think your float looks “perfectly lovely” she said, which she did not think at all, “and it just makes me homesick to see that sign. And just to think of you two coming all the way from Goodale Farm! It’s like—a—caravan from—you know—from Arizona!”