The ceremony took place in the basement-room where we play in bad weather.  It’s across from the dining-room, the kitchen being between, and it’s a right nice place to march in, being long and narrow.

I was the preacher, and Prudence Arch and Nita Polley, Emma Clark and Margaret Witherspoon were the bridesmaids.

Lizzie Wyatt was the bride, and Katie Freeman, who is the tallest girl in the house, though only fourteen, was the groom.

Katie is so thin she would do as well for one thing in this life as another, so we made her Dr. Rudd.

We didn’t have but two men.  Miss Webb says they’re really not necessary at weddings, except the groom and the minister.  Nobody notices them, and, besides, we couldn’t get the pants.

I was an Episcopal minister, so I wouldn’t need any.  Mrs. Blamire’s raincoat was the gown, and I cut up an old petticoat into strips, and made bands to go down the front and around my neck.  Loulie Prentiss painted some crosses and marks on them with gilt, so as to make me look like a Bishop.  I did.  A little cent one.

There wasn’t any trouble about my costume, because I could soap my hair and make it lie flat, and put on the robe, and there I was.  But how to get a pair of pants for Katie Freeman was a puzzle.

Nothing male lives in the Humane.  Not even a billy-goat.  We couldn’t borrow pants, knowing it wouldn’t be safe; and what to do I couldn’t guess.

Well, the day came, and, still wondering where those pants were to come from, I went out in the yard where a man was painting a window-shutter that had blown off a back window.  Right before my eyes was the woodhouse door wide open, and something said to me: 

“Walk in.”

I walked in; and there in a corner on a woodpile was a real nice pair of pants, and a collar and cravat, and a coat and a tin lunch-bucket, which had been eaten—­the lunch had.  And when I saw those pants I knew Katie Freeman was fixed.

They belonged to the man who was painting the shutter.

It was an awful hot day, and he had taken them off in the woodhouse and put on his overalls, and when he wasn’t looking I slipped out with them, and went up to Miss Bray’s room.  She was down-stairs talking to Miss Jones, and I hid them under the mattress of her bed.

I knew when she found they were missing she’d turn to me to know where they were.  No matter what went wrong, from the cat having kittens or the chimney smoking, she looked to me as the cause.  And if there was to be any searching, No. 4—­I sleep in No. 4 when Miss Katherine is away—­would be the first thing searched.  So I put them under her bed.

I wish Miss Katherine could have seen that man about six o’clock, when the time came for him to go home.  She would have laughed, too.  She couldn’t have helped it.

He is young, and Bermuda Ray says he is in love with Callie Payne, who lives just down the street.  He has to pass her house going home, and I guess that’s the reason he wore his good clothes and took them off so carefully.  But whether that was it or not, he was the rippenest, maddest man I ever saw in my life when he went to put on his pants and there were none to put.