"Your pageant? It's just as I said it would be. We Pottles will do the dirty work and the Gulicks will grab the glory. They've behaved so piggish that everybody in town is sore at them, and I don't see how the pageant is going to come out on top. You'd probably have gotten that thousand from old Felix Winterbottom if it hadn't been for them. Then you wouldn't have to be losing a pound a day over this pageant. Now if you'd only gotten up a nice old-fashioned chicken supper, and a minstrel show——"
"Ambrose! Go put on your trousers!"
§3
Despite Mr. Pottle's pessimistic predictions, there was not a vacant seat or an unused cubic foot of air in the Granville Opera House that clinging Spring night, when the asbestos curtain, tugged by tyro hands, jerkily ascended on the prologue of the Grand Historical Pageant of the Growth of Civilization in Granville for the Benefit of the Browning-Tagore Club's Day Nursery. Those who did not have relatives in the cast appeared to have been lured thither by a certain morbid curiosity as to what a pageant was. Their faces said plainly that they were prepared for anything.
After the orchestra had raced through "Poet and Peasant," with the cornet winning by a comfortable margin, Mrs. P. Bradley Gulick, somewhat short of breath and rendered doubly wall-eyed by an inexpert make-up, appeared in red, white and blue cheese-cloth, and announced in a high voice that she was the Spirit of Progress and would look on with a kindly, encouraging eye while history's storied page was turned and spread before them, and, she added, in properly poetic language, she would tell them what it was all about. The audience gave her the applause due the dowager of the town's leading family, and not one hand-clap more. Mr. P. Bradley Gulick, bony but impressive, in a Grecian robe, appeared and proclaimed that he was the Spirit of Civilization. A Ballet of the Waters followed, and as a climax, Evelyn Gulick, age thirteen, in appropriate green gauze, announced:
"Who am I, oh friends and neighbors?
I'm the Spirit of the Waters,
Lordly, swift, Monongahela;
Argosies float on my bosom——"
She tapped her narrow chest, and a look of horror crept into her face; her mind seemed to be groping for something. Tremulously she repeated,
"Argosies float on my bosom."
The voice of Mrs. Pottle prompted from the wings,
"And fleets of ships with treasures laden."