is book and leaped to his feet as though his little
body were galvanised. The others looked at him in guilty dread, fearing
he had heard and had somehow understood their awkwardly veiled allusions
to his parentage. But they were mistaken. A sound, far more potent to
every normal child's ear than the fiercest thunders of morality, had
reached his keen senses as he lounged up there. And a moment later they
all heard it.

It was the braying of a distant but steadily approaching brass band.
With it came a confused but ever louder medley of shouts, handclapping,
raucous voices, and the higher tones of delighted children. As Kathrien
came running in at one door, followed by Marta, and Frederik sauntered
in from the office, Willem rushed down the stairway and into the window
seat, where he sprang upon a chair and craned his neck to see the
stretch of village street beyond. Nearer and louder came the music and
the attendant vocal Babel.

"It's the circus parade!" shouted Willem. "The one they tell about in
the advertisements and pictures on the fences. I didn't know the parade
would start so early. There come some of them now. Oh, look! Oom Peter!
Look! It's a clown! See! He's coming right toward us!"

The band in full brazen force was discoursing a "Dutch Ditties" waltz as
it turned the corner above. And now, the voices of the barkers were
heard in the land.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," came the leathern tones of one unseen announcer,
"one hour before the big show begins in the main tent we will give a
grand free balloon ascension!"

"Remember," adjured a second Unseen, "one price admits you to all parts
of the big show!"

"Lemo--lemo--ice cold lemonade--five cents a glass!" shouted a youthful
vender.

"You ought to quaff one beaker of it to Sir Walter Scott's memory, Mrs.
Batholommey," observed McPherson.

But the din of the oncoming parade drowned his voice. The whole roomful,
from Marta down to Willem, were thronging into the bay window. They were
all children again. A touch of circus had renewed their youth as by the
wave of a magic wand. Willem broke into a cry of utter joy and pointed
ecstatically at the open window.

The next moment a clown, white and vermilion of face, clad in the
traditional white, black, and scarlet motley of his tribe, had leaped
cat-like upon the window sill and swept the room with his painted grin.
In his hands he held a great bunch of variegated circus bills. Tossing a
half-dozen of these