d.

Having accepted their homage and heard the details of their latest
raids against her enemy, the false Duke of Dallas--he whose treachery
had made her what she was--she assumed her throne and held formal court.

The throne was a low, flat rock beside a stream, and usually Ma removed
her shoes and stockings and paddled her feet in the water while she
gave audience to visiting potentates. Those enlarged joints never
seemed to accommodate themselves wholly to the sort of shoes Allie made
her wear. Court "let out" when Ma's feet had become rested, after which
there were less formal affairs of state to settle. These out of the
way, it was time for the queen's recreations, which took the form of
singing, dancing, conversations with animals, visits with the invisible
fairy folk who lived in flowers and gave them their pretty smells.

Ma never had any trouble putting in the whole day in some such manner
as this; evening came all too soon, as a matter of fact. Then it was
that she bade good-by to her faithful subjects and prepared once more
to fare forth and mingle, in the cunning guise of an old woman, with
the followers of the false and lying Duke of Dallas. But courage!
Patience! The day of reckoning was at hand when she would come into her
own and the world would recognize her as the wronged but rightful
Princess Pensacola.

Thus would Ma Briskow spend one morning. Another perhaps she would be
an altogether different character, but always she was young and
beautiful and full of grace, and only when it came time to go did she
assume the disguise of an aged, wrinkled, bent old woman. Sometimes she
ran miles and miles at a stretch, darting, springing like a fawn,
rushing through the soft, green leaves, leaping rock and rill, her
laughter echoing, her bare limbs flashing, her gold hair streaming, her
scanty silken draperies whipped to shreds behind her by the very
swiftness of her going. Oh, the ecstasy of that! The excitement!

Of course Ma did not actually run. Neither did her bare limbs
flash--being incased in flannels. And her hair was not gold. It was
gray, what little there was of it. No, she ambled a bit, perhaps, where
the grass was short and the ground smooth, then she stood still, closed
her eyes, and ran and leaped and swayed and darted--with her arms.
Anybody can do it.

At other times she defied gravitation, a secret accomplishment all her
own, which she manifested in this wise. She would begin to jump, hig