Oh, blare of brass, Oh, fanfare of trumpets, Oh, triumphant entry of all hitherto but dimly sensed and hauntingly visioned, color, pageant, rhythm, triumph, glory, heretofore lost as they came, but now palpable, tangible, and existent!
Oh, pitiful, a bit terrifying, white-faced clown! The butt, the mock, the bear-all! Emmy Lou does not laugh at the clown! Because she pities him and is sorry for him, her heart goes out to him instead! And she trembles for Nella as her horse urged by the snapping, menacing whip sweeps by faster and even faster—and she cries out when at the crash of the kettle-drums, Zephine leaps——
"But I didn't see the elephant like I did the lions and the camel and the tiger," she tells Logan and Albert Eddie and the others. Nor had she. The elephant had gone to take his place in the triumphal entry when Emmy Lou and her four cicerones, in their progress through the animal tent before the program, reached his roped-in inclosure.
And so they made their way back to him through the surging crowd as they went out, four solicitous little boys conducting Emmy Lou. Made their way as near as might be, then pushed her through the row of spectators in front of them to the rope.
"He picks little children up and puts them in his trunk," she was saying as one fascinated by the very awfulness of that she dwelt on, as they squeezed her through.
Why should that monstrous bulk of elephant have trumpeted just then—as Emmy Lou emerged at the rope—have flung his trunk out in all the lordly condescension of a mighty one willing to stoop, in the accustomed quest of peanuts?
Aunt Louise, returning from a futile trip to the church corner to meet Emmy Lou, had just explained that the picnic had not returned, being delayed, so rumor said, by the search for five missing children, when Bob walked in bringing a dust-laden Emmy Lou.
"Came on her at the circus?" from Aunt Cordelia incredulously.
"In the animal tent roun' there whar thet elephunt is," Bob diagrammed.