They took little Peter and dressed him like a trumpet. They thrust both his legs into one long cloth-of-gold stocking, and he held his arms tightly at his sides while they wound his little body in ruffles of gold-coloured silk, growing broader and broader into a full-gathered ruff from which his laughing face peeped out. And he was so slender and graceful that you could hardly have told him from a real, true, golden trumpet.
Then the procession was ready to start, all lined up in the great tent. And the heralds and the music all burst out at once as the green curtain of the tent was drawn aside, and the long, glittering line began to move. Little heralds, darting about for all the world like squirrels and chipmunks; a great elephant of a master of ceremonies, bellowing out the order of the day as if he had been presiding over the jungle; a group of men high in the town’s confidence, whose spots proclaimed them once to have been leopards, and other things; long, lithe harlequins descended from serpents; little, fat clowns still showing the magpie; prominent citizens, unable as yet to conceal the fox and the wolf in their faces; the mayor of the town, revealing
