Peter never had seen anything so strange and wonderful as what was within that tent. In it everything and everybody had just been or was just going to be something or somebody else. Not only had the gay garments piled on the floor just been sheep’s and silkworm’s coats, not only had the colours laid upon them just been roots and stems and herb-leaves, not only had the staves been tree’s boughs and elephant’s tusks, but the very coal burning in the braziers and the oil in the torches had once been sunshine, and the very flames had been air, and before that water, and so on. But, most of all, the people showed what they had been, for in any merry-making the kinds of animals in folk can_not_ be covered up; and it was a regular menagerie. They took little Peter and dressed him like a trumpet. They thrust both his legs into one long cloth-of-gold stocking, and he held his arms tightly at his sides while they wound his little body in ruffles of gold-coloured silk, growing broader and broader into a full-gathered ruff from which his laughing face peeped out. And he was so slender and graceful that you could hardly have told him from a real, true, golden trumpet. Then the procession was ready to start, all lined up in the great tent. And the heralds and the music all burst out at once as the green curtain of the tent was drawn aside, and the long, glittering line began to move. Little heralds, darting about for all the world like squirrels and chipmunks; a great elephant of a master of ceremonies, bellowing out the order of the day as if he had been presiding over the jungle; a group of men high in the town’s confidence, whose spots proclaimed them once to have been leopards, and other things; long, lithe harlequins descended from serpents; little, fat clowns still showing the magpie; prominent citizens, unable as yet to conceal the fox and the wolf in their faces; the mayor of the town, revealing the chameleon in his blood; little donkey men; and a fine old gentleman or two made like eagles--all of them getting done into men as quickly as possible. In the midst rode the king of the carnival, who had evidently not long since been a lion, and that no doubt was why they picked him out. He rode on a golden car from which sprays of green sprang out to reach from side to side of the broad street. And at his lips, held like a trumpet, he carried little Peter, one hand on Peter’s feet set to the kingly lips, and the other stretched out to Peter’s breast. Then Peter lifted up his shrill little voice and shouted loud his message:-- “_The world is beginning! The world is beginning! The world is beginning! You must go and help the king. You must go-o-o and help the king!_” But just as he cried that, the carnival band struck into a merry march, and all the heralds were calling, and the people were shouting, and Peter’s little voice did not reach very far.