“What a very good joke,” they said. “How very clever! And isn’t it strange that we should never have thought of it before?”
“Now, then,” said Church Mouse, who was all dressed up in a long coat, and had a silk hat and a long whip. “As the ring master of this show, I want to introduce my great and good friend, Sig Salamander, who eats fire for breakfast instead of oatmeal, and drinks his coffee boiling hot. He will now do himself the honor of eating a red hot poker as though it were a stick of molasses candy.”
Then Salamander came out, followed by four mice, carrying a pan of coals.
“Everything that I have,” said Salamander, “must be red hot. Once I ate some red pepper drops and ever since that nothing has been too hot for me.”
He ate all sorts of fire, and then Wasp got up and said that he did not think Salamander could stand everything hot, and with this he gave him a sting.
Salamander ran away from the place, and as he turned to go his feet kicked the pan of coals and sent them way up in the air, until they set fire to the tent. All the beasts and all the birds saw the flames above them, and they were nearly scared to death. They scampered everyway that they could. They knocked down the seats and kicked over the tent poles, upset the animal cages and spilled the red lemonade. Before Church Mouse knew what had happened his tent had all burned up, and it was all that he could do to save his money and his boxes of cheese. After it was all over he sat looking at the ruins, and then said:
“It seems to me that I have made a great mistake. If I ever have a salamander in a circus of mine again I will have everybody who sees the circus a salamander, too.”
Although the tent had burned up, Church Mouse had made so much money that he did not have to work any more. He built a fine house, and every Sunday as you saw him sitting in church under one of the pews you would never have believed that he knew a single thing about circuses.