CHAPTER FOUR
THE MISADVENTURE OF A CIRCUS
After a great deal of pleading, bringing to bear everything with which I was acquainted in the art of persuasion, I had succeeded in inducing Jean François to leave his happy caravan for a day and to become friends with our back yard. My family, be it understood, were dining in the country, leaving the premises to my undisputed control from early morning until late afternoon. Our pedler came with trepidation. He scented mischief of a kind which he did not find congenial. He had the greatest aversion to unexpectedly meeting people whom he did not know or did not like. Also he demanded room—the wide spaces of the open. To come about a house, or to enter an enclosure where escape would be fraught with embarrassment, was to him exceedingly painful. His apparent panic reminded me strongly of some timid, uncertainly tamed animal bravely trying to receive the caresses of human beings. Persistence prevailed, however, and he stole around the house, like someone bent upon a hopeless task, and seated himself upon the woodpile.
He looked about him with evident disapproval. Then, removing Pierrett from his mouth, he addressed her with elaborate politeness:
"Say, my sweet hussy, did you ever notice the personality of a crack in the fence? Have you ever given study to the sins of back yards?... Yes?... Just the other day I heard the old doctor say that you could tell the condition of a man's liver by the appearance of his back yard.... He's right about it."
In general esteem our back yard, if you choose to remember, was second only to the attic. The crack in the fence was its thorn in the flesh. Of course the kitchen opened onto it, or rather, it opened onto the kitchen, for this warm bread-scented producer of tarts is not to be compared in point of importance with this plot sacredly set apart for make-believers. Here, however, is a fitting place to state that for an inn the kitchen suited admirably, and Betty, though black-a-visaged as a pirate, made a very respectable Mine Host.
The right side was flanked by an impassable high board fence which Grown-ups, I have since learned, built to hide their back-yard sins from their neighbors, the Greens, who possessed a similar assortment. To us, however, it was a stockade erected by no less a personage than our comrade Daniel Boone, famous for his cigars, and served to protect us from the Indians who, in reality, were the half-dozen assorted little Greens, then on the summit of the stone age. These savages weren't at all neighborly, a thing for which we never ceased to be thankful. The really splendid part about it was that at any time, without other warning than a sudden whoop, rocks were likely to be thrown over the fence at our unsuspecting heads. Though once and a while producing a scalp wound upon our side, it was altogether a very harmless play, with just enough excitement to keep it alive. Besides, in the end, all of the stones the Greenlets ever threw away always found their way back to their side of the stockade. And what matter to any of us if it caused the mothers on either side to cease speaking except in company, and the fathers to have only a mere business bow?
In our back yard was the stable, two parts of which are worthy of mention. There was the hay-loft, reached by a steep and rickety ladder through a hole in the floor, a fine old place in which to hide from visiting dressed-up small boys whose presence was, on general principles, undesirable. Then there were great billows of hay, with sweet, breezy odors, on which one might be cast away on a pitchfork raft for days and days. Above, on the rafters, were drab-colored nests of mud-daubing martins, which easily became gulls, albatross, or distant sails, as the moment might demand.