the elder lady.

"Where's Maria?"

"Gone on ahead!" grunted the younger gentleman, in a bass voice, so
incongruously large for him that it seemed to have been a
ventriloquistic contribution by somebody else.

It was too true. Maria, after adding her pungency to the general
conversation, had darted on ahead. But alas! that swift Camilla,
after scouring the plain some two hundred feet with her demitrain,
came to grief on an unbending tussock and sat down, panting but
savage. As they plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips,
smacked them on her cruel little white teeth like a festive and
sprightly ghoul, and lisped:--

"You DO look so like guys! For all the world like those English
shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion
in their Sunday clothes!"

Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose
fine feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in
the sea breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and
sky and shore. A few gulls screamed at them; a loon, startled from
the lagoon, arose shrieking and protesting, with painfully extended
legs, in obvious burlesque of the younger gentleman. The elder
lady felt the justice of her gentle daughter's criticism, and
retaliated with simple directness:--

"Your skirt is ruined, your hair is coming down, your hat is half