But nobody was there to receive!  A flock of guests was assembling,—­peasant girls, Italian, German, and Norman; Turks, Greeks, Persians, fish-wives, brigands, chocolate-women, Lady Washington, Penelope, Red Riding-hood, Joan of Arc, nuns, Amy Robsart, Leicester, two or three Mary Stuarts, Neapolitan fisher-boys, pirates of Penzance and elsewhere,—­all lingering, some on the stairs, some going up, some coming down.

Charles I. without his head was entering the front door (a short gentleman, with a broad ruff drawn neatly together on top of his own head, which was concealed in his doublet below).

Three Hindu snake-charmers leaped wildly in and out among the throng, flinging about dark, crooked sticks for snakes.

There began to be a strange, deserted air about the house.  Nobody knew what to do, where to go!

“Can anything have happened to the family?”

“Have they gone to Egypt?” whispered one.

No ushers came to show them in.  A shudder ran through the whole assembly, the house seemed so uninhabited; and some of the guests were inclined to go away.  The Peterkins saw it all through the long library-windows.

“What shall we do?” said Mr. Peterkin.  “We have said we should be ‘At Home.’”

“And here we are, all out-of-doors among the hollyhocks,” said Elizabeth Eliza.

“There are no Peterkins to ‘receive,’” said Mr. Peterkin, gloomily.

“We might go in and change our costumes,” said Mrs. Peterkin, who already found her Elizabethan ruff somewhat stiff; “but, alas!  I could not get at my best dress.”

“The company is filling all the upper rooms,” said Elizabeth Eliza; “we cannot go back.”

At this moment the little boys returned from the front door, and in a subdued whisper explained that the lady from Philadelphia was arriving.

“Oh, bring her here!” said Mrs. Peterkin.  And Solomon John hastened to meet her.

She came, to find a strange group half lighted by the Chinese lanterns.  Mr. Peterkin, in his white toga, with a green wreath upon his head, came forward to address her in a noble manner, while she was terrified by the appearance of Agamemnon’s ass’s head, half hidden among the leaves.

“What shall we do?” exclaimed Mr. Peterkin.  “There are no Peterkins; yet we have sent cards to everybody that they are ’At Home’!”

The lady from Philadelphia, who had been allowed to come without costume, considered for a moment.  She looked through the windows to the seething mass now crowding the entrance hall.  The Hindu snake-charmers gambolled about her.

“We will receive as the Peterkin family!” she exclaimed.  She inquired for a cap of Mrs. Peterkin’s, with a purple satin bow, such as she had worn that very morning.  Amanda was found by a Hindu, and sent for it and for a purple cross-over shawl that Mrs. Peterkin was wont to wear.  The daughters of the lady from Philadelphia put on some hats of the little boys and their India-rubber boots.  Hastily they went in through the back door and presented themselves, just as some of the wavering guests had decided to leave the house, it seeming so quiet and sepulchral.