Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/130

 little dressing-tent, thronged with trunks and boxes and dresses and women busily engaged in flinging silver-spangled finery over their bare shoulders, Lonely was promptly seized by Cavarolla, the Queen of the Tight Rope, and as peremptorily and calmly deprived of his outer raiment as though he had been a head of lettuce being made ready for the cook-tent dinner.

Yet as nobody seemed to pay the slightest attention to his pink-skinned embarrassment, he came to perspire less by the time he had been padded out with a soiled and sadly worn pair of "symmetricals" and had thrust his bandy young legs into a pair of slack and equally soiled trunk-hose. He was then backed up and plumped down on a box, with much dispatch and energy, where he was given a generous sweep of rice powder, and a hasty dab or two of red face-paint was put on his freckled cheeks—though what make-up could ever adequately hide that nebulous runway of telltale turkey-spots!

Lonely clambered up on the great wagon as nimbly and lightly as a young monkey, where in blue-and-white draped majesty already stood