“O, Dan, Dan, Diggeldy Dan.”
“Why,” answered the clown—for you must have guessed that he was a clown—“Why,” he repeated,
“You are the courier from Too-Bo-Tan.”
But though the bird nodded in approval, as if to say, “Yes, yes, that is correct,” it still seemed reluctant to admit that the man was really Diggeldy Dan. So it put its head first to one side and then to the other, and puckered its very blue brows, as if thinking up some further test. And then it spoke again.
“Diggeldy Dan—if, indeed, you are Diggeldy Dan—who was it told you the last line of the rhyme?”
“Why,” answered the clown with great readiness, “it was the Pretty Lady with the Blue-Blue Eyes. She came to me in a dream last night—riding her White-White Horse through the skies. She wakened me, or at least I thought she did, by tickling my nose with her slim little whip. She said: ‘To-morrow, after the circus is over and the great crowd has gone home to its supper, and after the people of the circus have had their suppers and are come back to the shady places in and about the big and little tents, to read and to tell their tales and take their ease, they will all fall into a very deep sleep—that is, all but Diggeldy Dan.’”
And, at this, the clown paused to take a much-needed breath; for he had become somewhat excited in telling his story and, to speak the truth, had quite forgotten to breathe between sentences.
But at a sign from the bird, he went on:
“‘As for you, Dan, Dan, Diggeldy Dan,’ continued the Pretty Lady with the Blue-Blue Eyes, ‘you will not go to sleep. Instead, you are to hide in the round white tent that stands in the center of all the bigger tents, and wait for the messenger who will come out of the west.’ And then she told me the rhyme. ‘For to-morrow,’ she said, ‘you’ll have been a clown for a hundred years and a day.’ Yes, that was just what she said: ‘A hundred years and a day.’ And so I have been. But, what of that, my pretty bird? For see! I still can dance as merrily and as lightly as any butterfly that flits o’er the fields in the May!”
As if to prove what he had said, the funny old clown tripped off so very blithely and so very fast that he bumped smack into one of the red and golden wagons that stood in the lee of the round white tent.