answered, with a dignity and spirit he rarely showed with Mrs. Milray's
class of custom, "I'm goin' to drive our hossis myself."

She gave her whole time to imagining and organizing the personal display
on the coach. She consulted with the other ladies as to the kind of
dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and
when the time came she had all the young men ravaging the lanes and
pastures for the goldenrod and asters which formed the keynote of her
decoration for the coach.

She made peace and kept it between factions that declared themselves
early in the affair, and of all who could have criticized her for taking
the lead perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble.
She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents
of despair all over the place. When their dresses were finished she made
the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret of
the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the
effects she aimed at. But on the eve of realizing these in public she was
overwhelmed by disaster. The crowning glory of her composition was to be
a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the character
of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers, and
invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided as
to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to the
gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months. It had been
all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the Spirit of
Summer, who had been chosen for the inoffensiveness of her extreme youth,
was taken with mumps, and withdrawn by the doctor's orders. Mrs. Milray
had now not only to improvise another Spirit of Summer, but had to choose
her from a group of young ladies, with the chance of alienating and
embittering those who were not chosen. In her calamity she asked her