Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/476

84 Our circus family amuse themselves on deck with the side-show band, the mandolins, and the guitars; pitching pennies; watching ships and porpoises. Madam Hodji Tahar, a pretty Arabian acrobat, with the smoothest of dark olive complexions, black eyes, and hair of midnight, entertains us—occasionally—with a wild Spanish dance. Penny-ante in the smoking-room seems "on" night and day unceasingly. Our indefatigable artist passes his day among the animals between decks, and gathers an interested circle of mothers and children about him in the cabin in the evening. And there also, at the piano, sits Oxford, warbling in a low sweet tenor, songs in French, Italian, Spanish, and the four or five other languages he knows. And the bright eyes of the little Moorish woman who also speaks half a dozen languages, but can neither read nor write any of them, swim with pleasure, and her hands and feet and swaying figure describe the time of the castanets and ankle bells. Everybody shouts across the cabin, calling everybody else by his or her first name. It is "George," and "John," and "Charlie," and "Bill," and "Emma," and "Lizzie," and "Jennie." And so the circus family, below and above, get on happily together from start to finish.

In the very face of the Bishop Rock light we bury "Eagle," the beautiful black stallion whose particular accomplishment it was to dance the couchee-couchee with John O'Brien on his back. Eagle was thirty-six years old, and came from Hamburg. He had been with the show since 1869, and was probably one of the most intelligent, as well as beautiful, horses that ever appeared in the ring. They buried him by the dim light of a lantern in British waters—"darkly at dead of night"—and his groom stood by in the shadow of a wardrobe wagon and wept alone. Another horse, a baggage horse, died soon after, and was buried in the English Channel.

Up the Channel we steam, through the fog, that is the wonted foretaste of London, to the ominous screech of the siren; with the rattle of chains and the creaking of blocks; with all the steam windlasses going fore and aft, and the men all busy removing the lashings of the cages, and getting everything ready for a quick unloading to-morrow. And so ends the voyage.