'em
get above themselves. Excuse me, Sir Richard."

He leaned forward and laid both hands quietly on the reins.

"Look here, sir," he said, "I think you'd better let Henry lead the
horses past all this variety business."

The end of the street was reached. On either hand small red or white
houses trend away in a broken line along the edge of a flat, grass
common, backed by plantations of pollarded oak trees. In the
foreground, fringing the broad roadway, were booths, tents, and vans.
And the staring colours of these last, raw reds and yellows, the blue
smoke beating down from their little stove-pipe chimneys, the dirty
white of tent flaps and awnings, stood out harshly in a flare of stormy
sunlight against the solid green of the oaks and uprolling masses of
black-purple cloud.

Here indeed was the show. But to Richard Calmady's eyes it lacked
disappointingly in attraction. His nerves were somewhat a-quiver. All
the course detail, all the unlovely foundations, of the business of
pleasure were rather distressingly obvious to his sight. A
merry-go-round was in full activity--wooden horses and most unseaworthy
boats describing a jerky circle to the squeaking of tin whistles and
purposeless thrumpings of a drum. Close by a crop-eared lurcher, tied
beneath one of the vans, dragged choking at his chain and barked
himself frantic under the stones and teasing of a knot of idle boys. A
half-tipsy slut of a woman threatened a child, who, in soiled tights
and spangles, crouched against the muddy hind-wheel of a wagon, tears
dribbling down his cheeks, his arm raised to ward off the impending
blow. From the menagerie--an amorphous huddle of gray tents, ranged
behind a flight of wooden steps leading up to an open gallery hung with
advertisements of the many attractions within--came the hideous
laughter of a hyena, and the sullen roar of a lion weary of the rows of
stolid English faces staring daily, hourly, between the bars of his
foul and narrow cage, heart-sick with longing for sight of the open,
starlit heaven and the white-domed, Moslem tombs amid the prickly,
desert thickets and plains of clean, hot sand. On the edge of the
encampment horses grazed--sorry beasts for the most part, galled,
broken-kneed and spavined, weary and heart-sick as the captive lion.
But weary not from idleness, as he. Weary from heavy loads and hard
traveling and scant provender. Sick of collar and whip and reiterated
curses.

About the tents and b