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The other boys were proud to pass a word with them as they went by with their brimming buckets; fellows who had money to go in would have been glad to carry water just for the glory of coming close to the circus-men. They stood about in twos and threes, and lay upon the grass in groups debating whether a tan-bark ring was better than a sawdust ring; there were different opinions.
The day must come, of course, when the mangers will all be taken from the stable-shed, and exposed for sale at that wonderful second-hand shop which stands over against the tavern. I am no more surprised than one in a dream, to find it a week-day afternoon by the time I have crossed thither from the circus-men grooming their piebalds.
The circus was leaving that night. By a bonfire I came upon a bunch of small boys. There were about twenty of them, and as they talked with one another I learned that they were going to run away with the circus. Now the circus-men didn't want to be bothered with this mess of urchins, and a telephone to police headquarters had "coppered" the play.
I watched one fellow to-day through a series of positive trapeze movements from top to bottom and bottom to top of a grass-tangle. When he got through he shook himself, and smoothed off his legs exactly as the circus-men do. Then he took a long pull at a clover well. "Ah, the clover! Dearest! you should have seen how it swung to-day.
And menagerie-keepers and circus-men came and asked the Doctor to sell them the strange creature, saying they would pay a tremendous lot of money for him. But the Doctor always shook his head and said. "No. The pushmi-pullyu shall never be shut up in a cage. He shall be free always to come and go, like you and me."
It was lots of fun, too, watching the country-jakes, as the boys called the farmer-folk, and seeing how green they looked, and how some of them tried to act smart with the circus-men that came round with oranges to sell. But the great thing was to see whether fellows that said they were going to hook in really got in.
Even Cato, the law-abiding, precise Cato, thought it necessary to fall into the fashion and go about Rome with an armed following. He bought a company of gladiators and circus-men; but was obliged to sell them, as Cicero tells his brother with glee, because he could not afford to feed them. There are seven letters also to Atticus always more interesting than any of the others.
There will be another performance in the evening, with real fights outside between the circus-men and the country-jakes, and perhaps some of the Basin rounders, but the boys do not expect to come; that would be too much.
As soon as the circus-bills began to be put up you began to hear that certain boys were going to run off with that circus, and the morning after it left town you heard they had gone, but they always turned up at school just the same. It was believed that the circus-men would take any boy who wanted to go with them, and would fight off his friends if they tried to get him away.
They manifested by the usual signs their impatience to have the performance begin, and I confess that I shared this, though I did not take part in the demonstration. I have no intention of following the events seriatim. Front time to time during their progress I renewed my old one-sided acquaintance with the circus-men.
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