Sam didn’t come out, and didn’t intend to.  He was busy with the child’s curls, which were bunched up in the fingers of one hand, while the other was pressing the wide leghorn hat into the precise angle which would become her most, the Gossburger standing by with the rest of the costume, Masie’s face a sunburst of happiness.

“And now the long skirt, Mrs. Bombagger, or whatever your name is.  That’s it, over her head first and then down along the floor so she will look as if she was grown up.  And now the big ostrich-plume fan—­a little seedy, my dear, and yellow as a kite’s foot, but nobody’ll see it under that big, yellow lantern.  Now let me look at you!  Nat, Nat! where are you, you beggar, stop rummaging around that dead stuff and come behind here and look at this live child! yes, right in here.  Now look!  Did you ever in all your born days see anything half so pretty?” the outburst ending with, “Scat, you little devil of a dog!” when Fudge gave a howl at being stepped upon.

Masie, as she listened, plumed her head as a pigeon would preen its feathers, stood up to see her train sweep the floor, sat down again to watch the stained satin folds crumple themselves about her feet, and was at last so overcome by it all that she threw her arms around Sam, to his intense delight, and kissed him twice, and would have given Nat an equal number had not Felix called to him that the guests were beginning to arrive.

As to these guests, you could not have gotten their names on one side of Kitty’s order-book, nor on both sides, for that matter.  There was brisk, bustling Bundleton the grocer in a green necktie, white waistcoat, and checked trousers, arm and arm with his thin wife in black silk and mitts; there was Heffern the dairyman in funeral black, relieved by a brown tie, and his daughter, in variegated muslin, accompanied by two young men whom neither Kling nor Felix nor the Gossburger had ever heard of or seen before, but who were heartily welcomed; there were fat Porterfield the butcher in his every-day clothes, minus his apron, with his two girls, aged ten and fourteen, their hair in pigtails tied with blue ribbons; there were Mr. and Mrs. Codman, all in their best “Sunday-go-to-meetings,” with their little daughter Polly, named after the mother, pretty as a picture and a great friend of Masie—­most distinguished people were the Codmans, he looking like an alderman and his wife the personification of good humor, her rosy cheeks matching the tint of her husband’s necktie.

There was Digwell the undertaker in his professional clothes, enlivened by a white waistcoat and red scarf, quite beside himself with joy because nobody had died or was likely to die so far as he had heard, thus permitting him to “send dull care to the winds!”—­his own way of putting it.  There was Pestler the druggist in an up-to-date dress suit as good as anybody’s—­almost as good as the one Felix wore, and from which, for