t him, even in the well-kept yard.
She restricted his hours of play. And all the time never gave him a
loving word or caress.

On the contrary, many times a week Miss Lavinia administered a
tongue-lashing that suggested perpetual motion.

Mr. Wildwood had been something of an inventor. He had gotten up a
hoisting derrick that was very clever. It brought him some money. This
he sunk in an impossible balloon, crippled himself in the initial voyage
of his airship, and died shortly afterwards of a broken heart.

Andy's mother had died when he was an infant. Thus it was that he fell
into the charge of his unloving aunt.

It seemed that the latter had loaned Mr. Wildwood some money for his
scientific experiments. As repayment, when he died, she took the cottage
and what else was left of the wreck of his former fortune.

Even this she claimed did not pay her up in full, and she made poor Andy
feel all the time that he was eating the bread of charity.

Andy's grandfather had been a famous sailor. Andy had read an old
private account among his father's papers of a momentous voyage his
grandfather had made to the Antarctic circle.

He loved to picture his ancestor among the ship's rigging. He had an
additional enthusiasm in another description of his father's
balloon venture.

Andy wished he had been born to fly. He seemed to have inherited a sort
of natural acrobatic tendency. At ten years of age he was the best boy
runner and jumper in the village.

The first circus he had seen--not with Miss Lavinia's permission--set
Andy fairly wild, and later astonished his playmates with prodigious
feats of walking on a barrel, somersaulting, vaulting with a pole, and
numerous other amateur gymnastic attainments.

For the past month a circus, now exhibiting in a neighboring town, had
been advertised in glowing prose and lurid pictures on big billboards
all over the county.

Juvenile Fairview was set on fire anew with the circus fever. Andy's
rope-walking feat and double somersault act from desk to desk that
morning had resulted, getting him into the trouble of his life. It
furthermore had interrupted other performances on the programme listed
for later on that very day.

Andy's head had been full of the circus since he had seen its first
poster at a cross-roads. He could never pass a heap of sawdust without
cutting a caper.

In the spelling contest, he had stupefied his fellow students by nimbly
rattling over such words as