Among them was an Indian chief, with blanket, feathers, and war-paint,
and uplifted tomahawk; and near him, looking fit to be his woodland
bride, the goddess Diana, with the crescent on her head, and attended
by our big lazy dog, in lack of any fleeter hound. Drawing an arrow
from her quiver, she let it fly at a venture, and hit the very tree
behind which I happened to be lurking.
Another group consisted of a
Bavarian broom-girl, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two
foresters of the Middle Ages, a Kentucky woodsman in his trimmed
hunting-shirt and deerskin leggings, and a Shaker elder, quaint,
demure, broad-brimmed, and square-skirted. Shepherds of Arcadia, and
allegoric figures from the "Faerie Queen," were oddly mixed up with
these. Arm in arm, or otherwise huddled together in strange
discrepancy, stood grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary
officers with three-cornered cocked hats, and queues longer than their
swords.
A bright-complexioned, dark-haired, vivacious little gypsy,
with a red shawl over her head, went from one group to another, telling
fortunes by palmistry; and Moll Pitcher, the renowned old witch of
Lynn, broomstick in hand, showed herself prominently in the midst, as
if announcing all these apparitions to be the offspring of her
necromantic art. But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree near by,
in his customary blue frock and smoking a short pipe, did more to
disenchant the scene, with his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee
observation, than twenty witches and necromancers could have done in
the way of rendering it weird and fantastic.
A little farther off, some old-fashioned skinkers and drawers, all with
portentously red noses, were spreading a banquet on the leaf-strewn
earth; while a horned and long-tailed gentleman (in whom I recognized
the fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned his fiddle, and
summoned the whole motley rout to a dance, before partaking of the
festal cheer. So they joined hands in a circle, whirling round so
swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic
music, that their separate incongruities were blended all together, and
they became a kind of entanglement that went nigh to turn one's brain
with merely looking at it. Anon they stopt all of a sudden, and
staring at one another's figures, set up a roar of laughter; whereat a
shower of the September leaves (which, all day long, had been
hesitating whether to fall or no) were shaken off by the movement of
the air, and came eddying down upon the revellers.
Then, for lack of breath, ensued a silence, at the deepest point of
which, tickled by the oddity of surprising my grave associates in this
masquerading trim, I could not possibly refrain from a burst of
laughter on my own separate account.