obliged to content themselves with what
imagination could do for them. But one memorable year Mr. P. T. Barnum
landed and magnified himself on our own fences. His magnanimity ran over
and flamed into Still Harbor, bringing all his miracles and monsters to
our very doors, as it were, and we had no more miserable boys. But we
had plenty of boys who aspired to be miracles and monsters, or boys who
essayed the trapeze, the tight rope, the flying leap and all sorts of
possible and impossible acrobatic contortions and distortions.

Eminent among these was Benny Briggs, for if you looked high enough, you
could see him any day with a balancing pole in his hand, walking on the
ridge-poles and fences, or making of himself all sorts of peduncles and
pendulums; bringing about in his own individual person the most
astonishing inversions, subversions and retroversions, and the most
remarkable twists and lurches and topsey-turveys and topplings-over.

But there was one opportunity that Benny's soaring ambition had not
embraced. His active mind had never yet discovered the possibility of a
real tight rope. For a real tight rope he languished, on a tight rope he
yearned to walk. The clothes line was a little too slender; his sister
Fanny's skipping rope was not only too slender, but too short; and these
were the only ropes of his acquaintance. The ridge-poles and fences only
mocked at his ideal. He wanted something that hung unsupported;
something airy; something worthy of the acrobatic art, upon which he
could walk with credit and grace, and, reaching the end, bow and kiss
his hand to the spectators, before returning. For this he searched by
day, and of this he dreamed by night. And one day he found it.

"Benny," said his mother on the morning of that day, "your grandmother
Potter has sent for you to come over. She's going to have uncle John's
and uncle Calvin's boys there. You'll like that, won't you?"

"Hi!" shouted Benny, throwing up his new straw hat, the sign and seal of
pleasant summer weather, "I'd like to see the fellow that wouldn't!"

At nine o'clock that morning--at exactly nine o'clock--Benny started.
His mother remembered it well, for she looked up at the clock and said:

"Now, don't hurry, Benny; go along easily and you'll get there before
ten," for grandmother Potter's was scarcely two miles back in the
country, and Benny thought nothing of stepping over there, especially
when inducements were offered.

He called h