Americans -- Italy -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
lady-representative of a Sunday newspaper the points of her own tableau,
before she regained the courage and the faith in which she remained
serenely steadfast throughout the parade.
It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she
climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to
his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed
slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests crowding
the verandas.
The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize
was to be awarded at the judges' stand, and then the coaches were to
escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass as
many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the
carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives
of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching
parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it
came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of phantasmagoric
strangeness.
Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed
slowly along the rising and falling road. The songs of the young girls,
interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the
young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August
morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday
processional to sacrifice to their gods. Words of fierce Hebrew poetry
burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the
condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time
and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face
to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful or
ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots,
with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him and
out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.
When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the
landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and
Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, "Wave it, wave it!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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