The competitors left the arena, and the spectators transferred their
attention to unburdening hampers, or to jostling one another in the
dining-hall.

Everybody was feasting but Cynthia Hollis. The intense excitement of
the day, the novel sights and sounds utterly undreamed of in her
former life, the abruptly struck chords of new emotions suddenly set
vibrating within her, had dulled her relish for the midday meal; and
while the other members of the family repaired to the shade of a tree
outside the grounds to enjoy that refection, she wandered about the
"floral hall," gazing at the splendors of bloom thronging there, all
so different from the shy grace, the fragility of poise, the delicacy
of texture of the flowers of her ken,--the rhododendron, the azalea,
the Chilhowee lily,--yet vastly imposing in their massed exuberance
and scarlet pride, for somehow they all seemed high colored.

She went more than once to note with a kind of aghast dismay those
trophies of feminine industry, the quilts; some were of the "log
cabin" and "rising sun" variety, but others were of geometric
intricacy of form and were kaleidoscopic of color with an amazing
labyrinth of stitchings and embroideries--it seemed a species of
effrontery to dub one gorgeous poly-tinted silken banner a quilt. But
already it bore a blue ribbon, and its owner was the richer by the
prize of a glass bowl and the envy of a score of deft-handed
competitors. She gazed upon the glittering jellies and preserves,
upon the biscuits and cheeses, the hair-work and wax flowers, and
paintings. These latter treated for the most part of castles and seas
rather than of the surrounding altitudes, but Cynthia came to a pause
of blank surprise in front of a shadow rather than a picture which
represented a spring of still brown water in a mossy cleft of a rock
where the fronds of a fern seemed to stir in the foreground. "I hev
viewed the like o' that a many a time," she said disparagingly. To her
it hardly seemed rare enough for the blue ribbon on the frame.

In the next room she dawdled through great piles of prize fruits and
vegetables--water-melons unduly vast of bulk, peaches and pears and
pumpkins of proportions never seen before out of a nightmare, stalks
of Indian corn eighteen feet high with seven ears each,--all
apparently attesting what they could do when they would, and that all
the enterprise of Kildeer County was not exclusively of the feminine
persuasion.

Fin