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"Hate it! Why ?" "Why?" reiterated Hortense. "Why, when a king, who is too busy to sign death-reprieves, may spend the night hunting a single moth from room to room of the palace? Why, when ladies of the court dress in men's clothes to run the streets with the Scowerers? Why, when a duchess must take me every morning to a milliner's shop, where she meets her lover, who is a rope-walker?
During these studio days he studied legerdemain and ventriloquism, and became one of the most expert sleight-of-hand wizards and ventriloquial entertainers of his time. Donaldson's first appearance before the public was at the old Long's Varieties on South Third Street in Philadelphia. His feats as a rope-walker have probably never been surpassed.
But we were not given long in which to admire the elegance of such service, for all of a sudden the ceiling commenced to creak and then the whole dining-room shook. I leaped to my feet in consternation, for fear some rope-walker would fall down, and the rest of the company raised their faces, wondering as much as I what new prodigy was to be announced from on high.
I'll be the clown!" exclaimed Chris, pointing to the poster which showed trapeze performers turning somersaults in the air, a clown playing ringmaster to a dancing white pony and a girl walking a tight rope. "I'll be the dancin' pony!" cried Celia Jane. "I'll be the rope-walker," Nora said. "And what'll I be?" asked Jerry plaintively, feeling left entirely out in the cold.
And she has reason to be: the other is watching her from her lofty loop-hole. This is probably not the only cause of her fright. When my straw does induce her to take a few steps, I see her lift her legs with some difficulty. She tugs a bit, drags her tarsi till she almost breaks the supporting threads. It is not the progress of an agile rope-walker; it is the hesitating gait of entangled feet.
"Oh, it's a magnificins house, twice as big as this, with the roof bent like an elefin's back, an' three windows in it rale dormant windows, that looks like three eyes outen a crab, and a gabil end three rows of windows high, and four high chimneys. The rope-walker said it was fit to be a rueyal palace. Then thar's the kitchen an' colonnade built on to it.
Every Spider, as she goes, at the same time spins a safety-cord which will guard the rope-walker against the risk of an always possible fall. In the rear, therefore, the thread is of double thickness and can be seen, whereas, in front, it is still single and hardly perceptible to the eye.
To take the mountain-route was tedious, and in the case of Barbarossa not to be thought of; the bridge of Endarlasa was broken a most contorted specimen of artistic dilapidation. To be sure, one could manage to creep to the other side by the submerged coping of the parapet, if endowed with the balancing powers of a rope-walker and the lustihood of the navvy.
The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying that to him as it poised on the page, and, as his eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly, like a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail, half-frightened hold, while, high up, over the walls of the garden the poplars were discreetly swaying to the southern wind, and the lilac-bushes were carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance, as altar-boys swing their censers in the hushed chancel, but ah! so different an incense.
Suppose that all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put it in the hands of Blondin, the famous rope-walker, to carry across the Niagara Falls on a tight rope. Would you shake the rope while he was passing over it, or keep shouting to him, "Blondin, stoop a little more! Go a little faster!" No, I am sure you would not.
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