in so far that he had evidently gone into the woods early, moved by
the same desire: "I hope that I some green here getten may!" That
tiny girl, well to the front, with a clean white frock on and no hat
to cover her tangle of golden curls, was Baby Hippolyta,--the last,
the very last, of the seemingly endless sprouting olive branches of
the sexton, Adam Frost. Why the poor child had been doomed to carry
the name of Hippolyta, no one ever knew. When he, Walden, had
christened her, he almost doubted whether he had heard the lengthy
appellation aright, and ventured to ask the godmother of the
occasion to repeat it in a louder voice. Whereupon 'Hip-po-ly-ta'
was uttered in such strong tones, so thoroughly well enunciated,
that he could no longer mistake it, and the helpless infant,
screaming lustily, left the simple English baptismal font burdened
with a purely Greek designation. She was, however, always called
'Ipsie' by her playmates, and even her mother and father, who were
entirely responsible for her name in the first instance, found it
somewhat weighty for daily utterance and gladly adopted the simpler
sobriquet, though the elders of the village generally were rather
fond of calling her with much solemn unction: 'Baby Hippolyta,' as
though it were an elaborate joke. Ipsie was one of the loveliest
children in the village, and though she was only two-and-a-half
years old, she was fully aware of her own charms. She was pushed to
the front of the Maypole this morning, merely because she was
pretty,--and she knew it. That was why she lifted the extreme edge
of her short skirt and put it in her mouth, thereby displaying her
fat innocent bare legs extensively, and smiled at the Reverend John
Walden out of the uplifted corners of her forget-me-not blue eyes.
Then there was Bob Keeley, more or less breathless with excitement,
having just got back again from Badsworth Hall, his friend the
butcher boy having driven him to and from that place 'in a jiffy' as