kneel in the pag----""You must MANAGE!" This, uttered through pins, was evidently thought to be sufficient. They fastened some ruching about his slender neck, pinned ribbons at random all over him, and then Margaret thickly powdered his hair. 

"Oh, yes, that's all right," she said, replying to a question put by her mother. "They always powdered their hair in Colonial times." 

"It doesn't seem right to me--exactly," objected Mrs. Schofield, gently. "Sir Lancelot must have been ever so long before Colonial times." 

"That doesn't matter," Margaret reassured her. "Nobody'll know the difference--Mrs. Lora Rewbush least of all. I don't think she knows a thing about it, though, of course, she does write splendidly and the words of the pageant are just beautiful. Stand still, Penrod!" (The author of "Harold Ramorez" had moved convulsively.) "Besides, powdered hair's always becoming. Look at him. You'd hardly know it was Penrod!" 

The pride and admiration with which she pronounced this undeniable truth might have been thought tactless, but Penrod, not analytical, found his spirits somewhat elevated. No mirror was in his range of vision and, though he had submitted to cursory measurements of his person a week earlier, he had no previous acquaintance with the costume. He began to form a not unpleasing mental picture of his appearance, something somewhere between the portraits of George Washington and a vivid memory of Miss Julia Marlowe at a matinee of "Twelfth Night." 

He was additionally cheered by a sword which had been borrowed from a neighbor, who was a Knight of Pythias. Finally there was a mantle, an old golf cape of Margaret's. Fluffy polka-dots of white cotton had been sewed to it generously; also it was ornamented with a large cross of red flannel, suggested by the picture of a Crusader in a newspaper advertisement. The mantle was fastened to Penrod's shoulder (that is, to the shoulder of Mrs. Schofield's ex-bodice) by means of large safety-pins, and arranged to hang down behind him, touching his heels, but obscuring nowise the glory of his facade. Then, at last, he was allowed to step before a mirror. 

It was a full-length glass, and the worst immediately happened. It might have been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod's expectations had not been so richly and poetically idealized; but as things were, the revolt was volcanic. 

Victor Hugo's account of the fight with the devil-fish, in "Toilers of the Sea," 

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