Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/98

 hands, and essayed a flip-flop which did not quite materialize,—although our bright star, I repeat, indulged in marvels of strength and resorted to great feats of agility, his glory was dimmed by the sad consciousness that his awe-struck and admiring audience was made up of only eleven small girls, three babies in arms, and five diminutive males, all so young that they still wore frocks and dresses.

What counted the sighs and shouts of delight from such an audience; where, indeed, it was so easy to impress, and so worthless to be a wonder!

The last act of the performance was to have been an aërial dive from the top of the stall partition to a pile of timothy hay. But Lonely, in the excitement of the moment, decided to give his admiring and open-mouthed audience a few gratuitous exhibitions of strength. His first test of muscular prowess was an attempt to dislodge a suspicious-looking pine upright, which supported the wavering old hay-loft flooring. This inspired feat of our modern young Samson was eminently successful, for with it he brought down both the house and the roof, and at the same time forced the day's