Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
It was like being a schoolboy again and going forth to the Crystal Palace with money in my pocket, an entire half-crown, to be dribbled away in pennyworths of sherbet and visits to curious side-shows. That party was an annual affair for us that came in June as a celebration of the Queen's birthday. My visit to M. was in August, but the weather was still full summer.
She took him as a passenger through all the side-shows of life. She was tired of payments in flesh and blood. She found her recompense in teaching him how to talk, walk, eat, take pleasure in a penny ride on a river boat or on top of a bus, and in spending his entire allowance to their best joint profit. In return Lewis received many a boon. He was no longer alone.
A strong will is always directing the strong lines, forcing them to repeat an image present to the inner eye. In his early days Jack Yeats loafed about the quays at Sligo, and we may be sure he was at all the races, and paid his penny to go into the side-shows, and see the freaks, the Fat Woman and the Skeleton Man.
To sit near by and concentrate solely upon the doings of these ant people, was as easy as watching a single circus ring of performing elephants, while two more rings, a maze of trapezes, a race track and side-shows were in full swing. The jungle around me teemed with interesting happenings and distracting sights and sounds.
The human race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best to surround the Falls with every distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, power-houses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, sham legends, stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and breeding- place for all the touts of earth.
All round, before the circus doors were open, the doorkeepers of the side-shows were inviting people to come in and see the giants and fat woman and boa-constrictors, and there were stands for peanuts and candy and lemonade; the vendors cried, "Ice-cold lemonade, from fifteen hundred miles under ground! Walk up, roll up, tumble up, any way you get up!"
The dark crowds of people illuminated by flaring lights stood in perfect quiet as they watched the great noisy mass of moving animals and boats, occupied almost entirely by children, keep up its perpetual dazzle and roar. The fair for there were many side-shows was certainly quieter than any I have witnessed in England.
Then, Jonkheer Brederode took us to all the best side-shows: the giant steer, as big as sixteen every-day oxen; the smallest horse in the world, a fairy beast, thoughtfully doing sums in the sand with his miniature forepaw; the fat lady, very bored and warm; the fair Circassian, who lured audiences into a hot theater with tinsel decorations like a Christmas-tree and hundreds of colored lights.
With all its clap-trap side-shows and unseemly impostures of every kind, it is still grand, reverend, venerable for a god died there; for fifteen hundred years its shrines have been wet with the tears of pilgrims from the earth's remotest confines; for more than two hundred, the most gallant knights that ever wielded sword wasted their lives away in a struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from infidel pollution.
Faquirs as gruesome and fantastic as the side-shows at a Western fair flocked in to pose and be gaped at, receiving, besides free rations and tribute of small coin, gratification to their vanity in return for the edifying spectacle.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking