When Christmas Eve came and the children flocked into the Mayor's
mansion, whether it was owing to the Costumer's art, or their own
adaptation to the characters they had chosen, it was wonderful how
lifelike their representations were. Those little fairies in their
short skirts of silken gauze, in which golden sparkles appeared as they
moved with their little funny gossamer wings, like butterflies, looked
like real fairies. It did not seem possible, when they floated around
to the music, half supported on the tips of their dainty toes, half by
their filmy purple wings, their delicate bodies swaying in time, that
they could be anything but fairies. It seemed absurd to imagine that
they were Johnny Mullens, the washerwoman's son, and Polly Flinders,
the charwoman's little girl, and so on.
The Mayor's daughter, who had chosen the character of a goose-girl,
looked so like a true one that one could hardly dream she ever was
anything else. She was, ordinarily, a slender, dainty little lady
rather tall for her age. She now looked very short and stubbed and
brown, just as if she had been accustomed to tend geese in all sorts of
weather. It was so with all the others--the Red Riding-hoods, the
princesses, the Bo-Peeps and with every one of the characters who came
to the Mayor's ball; Red Riding-hood looked round, with big, frightened
eyes, all ready to spy the wolf, and carried her little pat of butter
and pot of honey gingerly in her basket; Bo-Peep's eyes looked red with
weeping for the loss of her sheep; and the princesses swept about so
grandly in their splendid brocaded trains, and held their crowned heads
so high that people half-believed them to be true princesses.
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