Page:Dick Hamilton's Fortune.djvu/106

94 "What are you doing?" asked a matron.

"Playing I'm a circus horse," was the answer. "I'se got to do suffin to make de time pass. I'm so happy!"

Long before the time set for the performance, crowds of boys and girls were headed for the big tents. Dick had generously arranged so that no boy or girl need pay, and hundreds of those in Hamilton Corners, as well as those in the surrounding suburbs, besides the orphans, saw the show free.

Dick wanted to go off with some of his chums and view the performance, but the head matron of the asylum asked him to sit with her in the midst of her little charges.

"They want to see you," she explained. "They think you own the circus, and that you are the most wonderful person in the world."

"Oh, pshaw! It isn't anything at all," declared Dick, with a blush. "I just happened to think of it when I saw the little children out walking and saw how sad some of 'em looked. Besides, it's time we had a circus in Hamilton Corners."

The antics of the clowns, the "hair-raising, death-defying evolutions in mid-air," as the programme called them, the performing horses and elephants, the pony races, the chariot contests, the trick dogs, pigs, monkeys, and other animals, the glittering pageant, the music and excitement—all this was as a happy dream to the orphans. They