ready to run to the house if
Danny should try to grab the ticket. "I earned the ticket and I'm
a-goin' to see the circus."

"Dinner's ready, children," called Mrs. Mullarkey. "You'll have to hurry
to get a good place to see the parade."

Jerry was ready to start without having anything to eat. He was too
excited to be hungry, but Mother 'Larkey made him eat so he "wouldn't
get too faint to enjoy the circus." It was a race between the boys to
see who would finish first. Chris won. Danny, who confessed to being
hungry, ate twice as much as Jerry and Chris.

"Now you children keep together at the parade," admonished Mrs.
Mullarkey, as they were ready to start. "You can follow the parade out
to the circus grounds for the free show outside, but Danny, you keep
with Nora and Celia Jane and see that they get home all right."

Jerry didn't see how the circus could be much more fascinating than the
parade with all its cages open so you could see the animals. And with
the clowns, too, especially the one with the donkey, going through such
laughable antics. But he was a little disappointed that the elephants
didn't jump a fence or do anything like that during the parade. However,
the beautiful ladies in gorgeous raiment who rode in the little houses
strapped to the elephants' backs made him forget about their
fence-jumping proclivities.

When the parade was over, Jerry and the Mullarkey children, together
with a hundred or more small boys and girls, followed the steam-throated
calliope through the principal street of the town out to the tents,
fascinated by the loudness of the music and the escape of jets of steam
as the player fingered the keys. It seemed to Jerry that there couldn't
in all the wide world be such heavenly music. Celia Jane and Chris
shared his enthusiasm, but Nora confessed to liking a fiddle better and
Danny asserted that the music of the trombone was easier on the ears.

The free exhibition on the little platform outside the side-show tent
had all the fascination of the unknown for Jerry and Chris and Celia
Jane and Nora, but not for Danny, who had been to the vaudeville theater
twice and who knew that this outside sample never could come up to the
glories to be revealed inside for fifty cents, or a dollar and a half
for reserved seats in the boxes, and was critical.

The dancing girl in short skirts and the man with the beard which fell
to his feet and the very red-faced snake charmer merely whetted hi