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At the entrance to a showman's travelling booth, a blind Christian slave, for four obols a day, was pumping up the water which produced this extraordinary harmony. Agamemnon dragged his companions into the booth, a great tent with blue awnings sprinkled with silver stars. A lantern lighted a black-board on which the order of the program was chalked up in Syriac and Greek.
The next instant Don Quixote and Sancho were both frightened and awed by the showman's suddenly throwing himself before Don Quixote's feet and embracing his legs, while he exclaimed: "These legs do I embrace as I would embrace the two pillars of Hercules, O illustrious reviver of knight-errantry, O prop of the tottering, so long consigned to oblivion!"
Alban's little set, so far as he had a "set" at all, consisted of the sometime curate of a fashionable West End Church, known to the company as the Archbishop of Bloomsbury; the Lady Sarah, a blooming, red-cheeked girl who sold flowers in Regent Street, "the Panorama," an old showman's son who had not a sixpenny piece in his pocket, but whose schemes were invariably about to bring him in "two thousand next Tuesday morning"; and "Betty," a pretty, fair-haired lad, thrown on the streets God knows how or by what callous act of indifferent parentage.
The light, which came from a dark-lanthorn, placed on the ground, revealed the forms of a peasant in a smock-frock, and two stout-built, stalwart men, armed with pistols besides the one engaged with Darvil. The whole of this scene was brought as by the trick of the stage as by a flash of lightning as by the change of a showman's phantasmagoria before the astonished eyes of the banker.
Then he took to the road for three years and traveled from Quebec to New Orleans lecturing on chemistry under the name of "Dr. Coult." The main feature of his lecture was the administration of nitrous oxide gas to volunteers from the audience, whose antics and the amusing showman's patter made the entertainment very popular.
At a high rate was to be reckoned the daily and hourly enjoyment of such interviews as the present, in which he seized upon the admiration of a passing stranger, and made him aware that a man of literary taste, and even of literary achievement, was travelling the country in a showman's wagon.
"Well, Tooting," he said, "I thought they'd begin to come." "They're mostly women," Mr. Tooting informed him. "Women!" "Hold on!" said Mr. Tooting, who had the true showman's instinct. "Can't you see that folks are curious? They're afraid to come 'emselves, and they're sendin' their wives and daughters. If you get the women tonight, they'll go home and club the men into line."
All the crowd laughed again. Suddenly the showman's hand gave a jerk, the bottle slipped from his hold and fell, shivering itself upon the ground. There was a buzz of wings the fairy had escaped. "The beautiful is coming true," thought the Jackdaw, as he yielded to the fairy her wand, and found, suddenly, that his wings were not clipped after all.
"But, my dear sir," interrupts the same gentleman who before questioned the showman's genealogical accuracy, "allow me to observe that these historical personages could not possibly have met together in the Main Street. They might, and probably did, all visit our old town, at one time or another, but not simultaneously; and you have fallen into anachronisms that I positively shudder to think of!"
"Hum, considering you say this boy only stole him this morning, they've got uncommon fond of one another! Call him and see if he'll come to you." But the showman's wiles were in vain. Pat would not go near him. "Have you any witnesses to prove he's yours, my lad?" Dick thought a moment and said, "I couldn't find the boy who saw him stolen from me. But Mr. Brown the carrier knows.
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