illow-case upon
her head, and could represent Desdemona not quite smothered. But Solomon
John wished to carry out the whole scene at the end.

As they stood together, all ready to receive, in the parlor at the
appointed hour, Mr. Peterkin suddenly exclaimed,--

"This will never do! We are not the Peterkins,--we are distinguished
guests! We cannot receive."

"We shall have to give up the party," said Mrs. Peterkin.

"Or our costumes," groaned Agamemnon from his ass's head.

"We must go out, and come in as guests," said Elizabeth Eliza, leading
the way to a back door, for guests were already thronging in, and up
the front stairs. They passed out by a piazza, through the hedge of
hollyhocks, toward the front of the house. Through the side windows of
the library they could see the company pouring in. The black attendant
was showing them upstairs; some were coming down, in doubt whether to
enter the parlors, as no one was there. The wide middle entrance hall
was lighted brilliantly; so were the parlors on one side and the library
on the other.

But nobody was there to receive! A flock of guests was
assembling,--peasant girls, Italian, German, and Norman; Turks, Greeks,
Persians, fish-wives, brigands, chocolate-women, Lady Washington,
Penelope, Red Riding-hood, Joan of Arc, nuns, Amy Robsart, Leicester,
two or three Mary Stuarts, Neapolitan fisher-boys, pirates of Penzance
and elsewhere,--all lingering, some on the stairs, some going up, some
coming down.

Charles I. without his head was entering the front door (a short
gentleman, with a broad ruff drawn neatly together on top of his own
head, which was concealed in his doublet below).

Three Hindu snake-charmers leaped wildly in and out among the throng,
flinging about dark, crooked sticks for snakes.

There began to be a strange, deserted air about the house. Nobody knew
what to do, where to go!

"Can anything have happened to the family?"

"Have they gone to Egypt?" whispered one.

No ushers came to show them in. A shudder ran through the whole
assembly, the house seemed so uninhabited; and some of the guests were
inclined to go away. The Peterkins saw it all through the long
library-windows.

"What shall we do?" said Mr. Peterkin. "We have said _we_ should
be 'At Home.'"

"And here we are, all out-of-doors among the hollyhocks," said Elizabeth
Eliza.

"There are no Peterkins to 'receive,'" said Mr. Peterkin, gloomily.

"We might go in and change our