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346 The Book of Indoor and Outdoor Games |
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at their outer ends, and the ends of his moustache an upward curve, was but the work of a moment, and he appeared "a very devil." "Friar Tuck" was accommodated with a brown bath-gown and rope girdle, with a sofa-pillow to add rotundity. "Punch" was provided with a mask—with hooked nose and chin tipped with red —and a peaked cap ending in a tassel, while Red Riding Hood stood confessed in a cloak of Turkey red, carrying a basket on her arm.
The guests not being on formal terms, the affair was a merry frolic, ending with a dance.
The hostess declared that it was not half so much trouble to get up the "properties" as to find favours for a cotillion, and the guests averred that to an ordinary dance it added the charms of a "costume ball," with no trouble of preparation.
Fortunately—perhaps not wholly by accident—the "Twelfth-Night King" was the "prince of good fellows" and did much to make the affair the success that it proved.
A CAKE CARNIVAL FOR TWELFTH-NIGHT
Twelfth-Night was to the pastry-cooks what Easter is to the florists of our own day—the opportunity to distinguish themselves by most wonderful achievements.
All London turned out on the eve of Twelfth-Night to look in the pastry-cooks' windows, lighted with unaccustomed brilliancy and gorgeous with cakes of all shapes, sorts, and sizes, often surmounted by marvellous structures, from a dragon emitting fire to a miniature man-of-war, furnished with tiny loaded guns, that went off with a loud report.
The "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" was not all a myth, for live birds were concealed under the |
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