V DIFFERENT
Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.
Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles, it had lain expressionless as the hills, for as long as memory. When in spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and night-in-a-trundle-bed.
And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing—these gave to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar with more than one had suspected.
"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as the glory of the scene burst upon him.
Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up at his brown Adam's apple—she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as her sweetheart's face—and rejoined:—
"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say great?"
"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."
He looked down in her face with a lifting of eyebrows and an honest fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look—without ever having met it squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who is unwillingly having second thoughts.
"My!" he said.