Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/118

 circus hands, already in the midst of their day's work, with the sun not yet up over the eastern hills.

It was, I suppose, the same old shoddy circus, with the same old shoddy tents and methods, and the same old indescribable smells and sounds, that has been alighting magically in small towns and as magically disappearing by night again, for a full half-century back.

Yet it was all once more new and strange and marvelous to Lonely,—the flash of the highly varnished floats, the cluck of the heavy little wagon wheels, the clinking and rattling of the chains, the shuffling and sleepy-eyed elephants (which promptly kill the reckless youth who dares to feed them so much as a thimbleful of chewing-tobacco, or, should he escape for the day, years hence will remember and single out the inexorably doomed offender), the enchanting, musty animal-smells, the grimy and foreign-looking tent-hands and stake-drivers, redolent of mystery and strong tobacco (to hold for whom even a halter shank was a never-to-be-forgotten honor), the trotting, nimble-footed Shetland ponies, the