Victor Hugo's account of the fight with the devil-fish, in "Toilers
of the Sea," encourages a belief that, had Hugo lived and increased in
power, he might have been equal to a proper recital of the half
hour which followed Penrod's first sight of himself as the Child Sir
Lancelot. But Mr. Wilson himself, dastard but eloquent foe of Harold
Ramorez, could not have expressed, with all the vile dashes at
his command, the sentiments which animated Penrod's bosom when the
instantaneous and unalterable conviction descended upon him that he was
intended by his loved ones to make a public spectacle of himself in his
sister's stockings and part of an old dress of his mother's.
To him these familiar things were not disguised at all; there seemed no
possibility that the whole world would not know them at a glance. The
stockings were worse than the bodice. He had been assured that these
could not be recognized, but, seeing them in the mirror, he was sure
that no human eye could fail at first glance to detect the difference
between himself and the former purposes of these stockings. Fold,
wrinkle, and void shrieked their history with a hundred tongues,
invoking earthquake, eclipse, and blue ruin. The frantic youth's final
submission was obtained only after a painful telephonic conversation
between himself and his father, the latter having been called up and
upon, by the exhausted Mrs. Schofield, to subjugate his offspring by
wire.
The two ladies made all possible haste, after this, to deliver
Penrod into the hands of Mrs.
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