“Ugh!  How good and spooky!” said Joyce, with a little shiver.  “I love that kind.”

They drew their chairs around Mrs. Sherman to listen, so interested in the story that two of the Bobs rolled over each other and off the high porch, and nobody noticed their whining.  Presently, in the most thrilling part of her story, Mrs. Sherman paused and pointed impressively down the avenue.

“Oo-oo-oo! what is it?  Ghosts?” shrieked the Little Colonel, her teeth chattering, and in such haste to throw herself into her mother’s arms that her chair turned over with a bang.

“It is a pillow-case party,” answered Mrs. Sherman, laughing, “but it is certainly the most ghostly-looking affair that I ever saw.”

Down the long avenue toward them came a wavering line of white-sheeted, masked figures.  They had square heads, and great round holes for eyes, and the candle that each one carried flashed across a hideous grinning face, whose mouth and nose had been drawn with burnt cork.  The leader of this strange procession was a veritable giant,—­the Goliath of all the ghosts,—­for he loomed up above them to nearly twice the height of the tallest one in the line.  It took two sheets to cover him; one flapped about his long thin legs, and one swung from his shoulders, swaying from side to side as he moved noiselessly along with gigantic strides.

“Oh, mothah, it’s awful!” whispered the Little Colonel, clinging around Mrs. Sherman’s neck.

“It is almost enough to frighten one,” she replied.  “But they are all friends of yours, Lloyd.  For instance, the giant is nobody but your good friend and playfellow, Robby Moore, on stilts; and somewhere in that bunch of little tots at the tail end of the procession are those funny little Cassidy twins, Bethel and Ethel.  They begged so hard to be allowed to come that their mother at last consented, although they are only six years old.  She said she would dress up in a sheet and pillow-case herself, and come with them, to see that nothing happened to them, so I suppose she is somewhere in the line.  I was told that everybody in the neighbourhood was coming; old people as well as children, but I’ll leave you to find out for yourself, as the fun of a party like this is in the guessing.  They will unmask before they go home.”

The procession glided on in silence until it reached the house, and then ranged itself in a long line in front of the group on the porch.

“There are thirty-eight,” whispered Joyce.  “I counted them.  Isn’t that one at the end funny?  That one in a bolster-case tied at the top, and his hands sticking out of the slits at the sides, like fishes’ fins.  I’m almost sure that it is Keith.  I could tell if I could only see his hands, but he has white stockings drawn over them.”

The figures began waving to and fro, faster and faster, until they were all drawn into a weird, uncanny dance, in which each one flapped or writhed or swayed back and forth as he pleased, in ghostly silence.  The movements of the ones in the bolster-cases were the most comical, and the little audience on the porch laughed until they could only gasp and hold their sides.