I started to retreat, when there appeared, walking towards us, a simple man, with nothing in the least extraordinary about him.
"That cannot be the Duke of Cimicifugas," thought I, "a man in a corduroy jacket, without a sign of a suite; probably it is a Banished Duke come from the Forest of Arden for a buttered muffin." But it was the Duke of Cimicifugas, and no other.

Hilda was presented first, while I tried to fire my courage by thinking of the Puritan Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, and the Boston Tea-Party, and the battle of Bunker Hill.

Then my turn came.

I murmured some words which might have been anything, and curtsied in a stiff-necked self-respecting sort of way.

Then we talked,--at least the duke and Lady Veratrum talked.