own-white grease paint, elephants, sleek barking seals, trained pigs,
superb white horses, frolicking dogs, exquisite ladies in tights and
spangles, the pallid Venuses of the "living statuary," a whole jumble
of incongruous and fantastic glimpses, moving in perfect order through
its arranged cycles--this is the blurred and ecstatic recollection of an
amateur clown at the circus.

It was pay day that afternoon and all the performers were in cheerful
humour. Perhaps that was why the two outsiders, who played a very
inconspicuous part in the vast show, were so gently treated. Certainly
they had approached the Garden in some secret trepidation. They had had
visions of dire jests and grievous humiliations: of finding themselves
suddenly astride the bare backs of berserk mules, or hoisted by blazing
petards, or douched with mysterious cascades of icy water. Pat Valdo had
written: "I am glad to hear you are going to clown a bit. I hope you
both will enjoy the experience." To our overwrought imaginations this
sounded a little ominous. What would Pat and his lively confreres do to
us?

We need not have feared. Not in the most genial club could we have been
more kindly treated than in the dressing room where we found Pat Valdo
opening his trunk and getting out the antic costumes he had provided.
(The eye of a certain elephant, to tell the truth, was the only real
embarrassment we suffered. We happened to stand by him as he was waiting
to go on, and in his shrewd and critical orb we saw a complete disdain.
He spotted us at once. He knew us for interlopers. He knew that we were
not a real clown, and his eye showed a spark of scorn. We felt shamed,
and slunk away.)

A liberal coating of clown-white, well rubbed into the palms before
applying; a rich powdering of talcum; and decorations applied by Pat
Valdo with his red and black paint-sticks--these give an effect that
startles the amateur when he considers himself in the mirror. Topped
with a skull-cap of white flannel (on which perches a supreme oddity in
the way of a Hooligan hat) and enveloped in a baggy Pierrot garment--one
is ready to look about and study the dressing room, where our fellows,
in every kind of gorgeous grotesquerie, are preparing for the Grand
Introductory Pageant--followed by the "Strange People." (They don't call
them Freaks any more.) Here is Johannes Joseffson, the Icelandic
Gladiator, sitting on his trunk, with his bare feet gingerly placed on
his slippe