Bills, as a rule, are small affairs measurable in inches; bits of paper which reduce Aunt Cordelia to figurings with a lead pencil, short replies, and low spirits.
But a circus bill, pink and pictorial, is measurable in feet. As Bob spread his on the kitchen table yesterday and again this morning, it fell either side well on the way to the floor. Its wonders, inexplicable where he, spelling out the text, forebore to explain, or explicable where he did if one knew no better than he, were measurable only by the limits of the mind to take them in. If Emmy Lou, who started to school last fall three weeks late owing to a popular prejudice against whooping-cough, had caught up as Aunt Cordelia easily assumed she would, or "caught on," in the words of Uncle Charlie, she might have been spelling out some of the wonders of the circus bill for herself.
Bob's finger had paused beneath a lady in myriad billowing skirts poised mid-air between a horse and a hoop such as Emmy Lou spent hours trying to trundle on the sidewalk. "She's jumpin' th'ough the hoop, but thet ain't nothin'. Heah in the other picture she's jumpin' th'ough six."
Emmy Lou, hurrying to the kitchen now and finding Bob about to start in with the soup, borrowed the bill and hurried back with it to the dining-room and Uncle Charlie's side.
"This one's an elephant," she explained, her finger, even as Bob's, beneath the picture. "He picks little children up and puts them in his trunk."
"I see you know, though some do call it his howdah," said Uncle Charlie. "And no doubt about the lions and the tigers, the giraffe and the zebra as well?" regretfully. "Even the lemonade?"
"Lemonade?"
"Pink. And peanuts." Uncle Charlie motioned to Bob to put his soup down and have done with it, as it were. "Also Nella, The Child Equestrienne in Her Triumphal Entry—here she is. And Zephine, the Wingless Wonder, in Her Flight Through the Air——"
"Am I going to the circus?" from Emmy Lou.
"That's what I hoped," from Uncle Charlie, handing back the bill and turning to his soup. "But of course if there is room for doubt about it——"