ANIMALS TRAINED—ANIMALS SAVAGE—
ANIMALS WONDERFUL
Gigantic Street Parade
FREE! FREE! FREE!
The whole town planned to turn out. There was to be no evening performance, and I schemed to have us all take our lunch—a whole crowd of us—and go over to the Pump pasture right from the parade, and spread it under the big maple, and see the sights while we et. I broached it to Mis' Toplady and Timothy and Eppleby and Marne Holcomb and Postmaster and Mis' Sykes, and some more—Mis' Arnet and Mis' Sturgis and Mis' Hubbelthwait; and they, all of them, and Lucy and me, fell to planning on who'd take what, and running over to each other's houses about sweet pickles and things we hadn't thought of, and we had a real nice old-fashioned time.
I'll never forget the day. It was one of the regular circus days, bright and blue and hot. Lucy Hackett and I went down to see the parade together; and we watched it, as a matter of course, from the window where I'd watched circus parades when I was a little girl. The horses, the elephants, the cages closed and the cages opened, the riders, the bands, the clowns, the calliope—that I was named for, because a circus with one come to town the day I was born—had all passed when, to crown and close the whole, we saw coming a wagon of the size and like we had not often beheld before.
It was red, it had flags, pennons, streamers, festoons, balloons. Continually up from it went daylight firecrackers. From the sides of it fell colored confetti. And it was filled, not with circus folks, dressed gorgeous, but with boys. And we knew them! Laughing, jigging, frantic with joy—we saw upward of a hundred Friendship Village boys. As the wagon passed us and we stared after it, suddenly the clamor of shouting inside it took a kind of form. We begun, Lucy and I, to recognize something. And what was borne back to us perfectly clamorous was:
S——s——s!
Yow! Yow! Yow!
Who's——all——right?
Mr. N——o——rdm——a——n!