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I was entering the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim. Vast as the show-grounds were, there were no vacant spaces in them outside of the lists, at ten o'clock on the morning of the 16th.
Here the crowds overflowed upon the gravel roadway, narrowing the thoroughfare to a lane through which the paraders barely might pass. They did pass, though at a lessened pace, until their front ranks had reached the approximate middle breadth of the old show-grounds, with the tabernacle looming against the sunset's dying fires an eighth of a mile on beyond.
Dozens of huge wagons were spread over the show-grounds; a multitude of men and horses swarmed in and about them; curious crowds of early risers stood afar off and gazed. The rhythmic pounding of iron stakes, driven down by four precise sledge-men came to his ears from all sides; the jangling of trace-chains; the creaking of wagons and the whine of pulleys.
When the "Wild West" visited Boston, one hot June day the parade passed a children's hospital on the way to the show-grounds. Many of the little invalids were unable to leave their couches. All who could do so ran to the open windows and gazed eagerly at the passing procession, and the greatest excitement prevailed.
I was entering the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim. Vast as the show-grounds were, there were no vacant spaces in them outside of the lists, at ten o'clock on the morning of the 16th.
At the point where the narrative was broken into for the interpolation of the episode now set forth, the head of the parade, as will be remembered, was just coming abreast of the old show-grounds. Now, the head of the parade was Cephus Fringe, and none other.
This year there was to be more than one celebration; there were to be two; and the opposition, organizing secretly and stealing a march on that usually wide-awake person, Æsop, had rented Belt Line Park, thus forcing Æsop's crowd to make a poor second choice of the old show-grounds, a treeless common away out near the end of Tennessee Street.
Certainly, the governess was dispensed with, and the dashing four-in-hand withdrawn from the local racecourses and agricultural show-grounds, of which it had long been the constant and conspicuous ornament, to be sold at public auction, without reason given. The great, hospitable house got a character for dullness for the first time in its history.
It was a humiliating and chastening experience to the man, who had supported himself by boxing in booths at fairs and show-grounds, to find this "bloomin' dook of a 'Percy," this "lah-de-dar 'Reggie'" who looked askance at good bread-and-dripping, this finnicky "Clarence" without a "bloody" to his conversation, this "blasted, up-the-pole 'Cecil'" a man with a quicker guard, a harder punch, a smarter ring-craft, a better wind, and a tougher appetite for "gruel" than himself.
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