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!"

The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung
their hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges' stand
and drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it.
Then Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace
with which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left
the village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort
before him. The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of
the victors, and followed them with applause as far beyond the village
borders as wind and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped
off breathless before they reached a half-finished house in the edge
of some woods. A line of little children was drawn up by the road-side
before it, who watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the