They prophesied it in a name borne by the first
circus I ever saw, which was also an animal show, but the animals must
all have died during the fifty years past, for there is now no menagerie
attached to it. I did not know this when I heard the band braying
through the streets of the village on the morning of the performance,
and for me the mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants of yore led the
procession through accompanying ranks of boys who have mostly been in
their graves for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an
advertising neck through the top of its cage, and the lion roared to
himself in the darkness of his moving prison. I felt the old thrill of
excitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and
I do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I had
done lunch. My heart rose at sight of the large tent (which was yet so
very little in comparison with the tents of the three-ring and
two-platform circuses); the alluring and illusory sideshows of fat women
and lean men; the horses tethered in the background and stamping under
the fly-bites; the old, weather-beaten grand chariot, which looked like
the ghost of the grand chariot which used to drag me captive in its
triumph; and the canvas shelters where the cooks were already at work
over their kettles on the evening meal of the circus folk.
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