MULTUM IN PARVO LIBRARY.
Entered at Boston Post Office as second class matter. Published by A. B. Courtney, Room 45, 74 Milk Street, Boston.
Vol. 3.
January, 1896.
Published Monthly.
No. 25
Subscription Price, 50 Cents Per Year.
A STORY OF THE SAWDUST.
Her mother was a slack-wire performer in the circus, and Patty was born in that part of the dressing-room reserved for the feminine talent, the privacy of which was a pleasant piece of fiction due to the strip of canvas that “Old Props” stretched across the tent in the centre. Immediately behind the “wall” the male performers struggled into pink tights, smoked cigarettes and streaked the air with loud-mouthed oaths, regardless of the proximity of the ladies, whose own language, to tell the truth, was none too choice.
Patty came into the world somewhat unexpectedly. Her parent, the only one she ever knew, had been seized with a sudden dizziness right in the middle of her great balancing act and had fallen heavily in the ring, from which she was tenderly carried to the ladies’ dressing-room, where, two hours later, on a hastily improvised bed of elephant trappings, camel coverings and spangled suits, snatched from the property wardrobe, a little mite of humanity was ushered into the world amid the roaring of the lions, the hoarse bleat of the hippopotamus, and the savage trumpetings of the elephants in the menagerie adjoining.
From her birth Patty was a great favorite with Old Props, who, in the absence of a legitimate father, constituted himself the male protector of the petite girl baby, whose tiny fingers toyed carelessly with the grizzled, brick-dusty beard of the gruff circus man whenever he took her in his arms. For Patty was raised with the circus. When she was two weeks old her mother resumed her “act” on the slack wire and from that time until her death, which occurred when Patty was ten years old, the little girl lived almost continuously in the atmosphere of the sawdust ring.