ed silver buckles.

"Fancy dress, huh?" Chris murmured, and then, as if he had been
slapped into full awareness, came the remembrance of the evening
before, of Mr. Wicker, and of the dark flickering shop.

Chris sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed, his mouth, in spite
of all his efforts, drawn down at the corners, and his eyes blank with
confusion and misery.

"Oh my golly!" Chris said, and stared at the clothes he still held in
his hands.

Then another idea struck him, and he jumped up to run to the nearest
dormer window, the floorboards, where the sun had lain on them, warm
under his bare feet.

But no. No freeway, no factories. The window looked out over Water
Street, skirting the edge of the Potomac banks, and there below
Chris's amazed eyes rose a forest of masts and spars of ships at
anchor along the shore. Water Street, below him, was swarming with
activity, but not the activity that Chris had previously known. Men
dressed in the same sort of clothes as those laid out for him pushed
at cotton bales, rolled hogsheads along to the docks, or rowed out to
ships anchored in midstream. Most of the stevedores were hatless, and
Chris snickered at the sight of the short braid of hair at the napes
of their necks. Many wore brilliant scarves tied around their heads,
red, or mustard-yellow or green, and the sound of deep voices
swearing, laughing, or rising in unfamiliar sea chanteys excited Chris
and sent the blood tingling along his veins.

He rushed to the high-placed window overlooking Wisconsin Avenue. No
Key Bridge was to be seen in the distance, only stretches of fields
and orchards, scattered with occasional houses of russet brick, and
when he craned his neck there was the inn where the People's Drugstore
ought to be, the sign swinging high above the road.

Wisconsin Avenue! Chris had to laugh. If it could see itself! Only a
wide muddy road full of ruts and puddles, along which someone's line
of geese was waddling, impervious to the cursing of passing carters
and riders on horseback. A little below him Chris could see the two
old warehouses he remembered from the night before. But now they
looked quite new, their bricks bright and their walls solid. Barrels
were being lifted by the winch and tackle into the upper loft, and
Chris watched the busy scene for quite some time.

His rolling stomach and a simultaneous smell of food reminded him of
his hunger. Dressing quickly in the strange new clothes, he op