“Surely,” answered all the revellers, gayly. “What is that to us, so that you come with us?”
They picked him up and tossed him on their shoulders—for he was of about a brazen trumpet’s weight, no more;—and Peter clapped his hands for joy, for he was a boy and he loved to think that he would be a part of that gorgeous procession. And they took him away to the great tent on the city green where everyone was dressing for the carnival.
Peter never had seen anything so strange and wonderful as what was within that tent. In it everything and everybody had just been or was just going to be something or somebody else. Not only had the gay garments piled on the floor just been sheep’s and silkworm’s coats, not only had the colours laid upon them just been roots and stems and herb-leaves, not only had the staves been tree’s boughs and elephant’s tusks, but the very coal burning in the braziers and the oil in the torches had once been sunshine, and the very flames had been air, and before that water, and so on. But, most of all, the people showed what they had been, for in any merry-making the kinds of animals in folk cannot be covered up; and it was a regular menagerie.
