and
feed the horses, and to give the hogs water. About one o'clock we
went on down the hill to Sabbath Day Pond and into the woods beyond
it. The loads were heavy and the horses were plodding on slowly, when,
just round a turn of the road in the woods ahead, we heard a deep,
awful sound, like nothing that had ever come to our ears before. For
an instant I thought it was thunder, it rumbled so portentously:
_Hough--hough--hough--hough-er-er-er-er-hhh!_ It reverberated through
the woods till it seemed to me that the earth actually trembled.

Willis's horses stopped short. Willis himself rose to his feet, and it
seemed to me his cap rose up on his head. Other indistinct sounds also
came to our ears from along the road ahead, though nothing was as yet in
sight. Then again that awful, prolonged _Hough--hough--hough!_ broke
forth.

Close by, lumbermen had been hauling timber from the forest into the
highway and had made a distinct trail across the road ditch. While
Willis stood up, staring, the horses suddenly whirled half round and
bolted for the lumber trail, hogs and all. They did it so abruptly that
Willis had no time to control them, and when the wagon went across the
ditch, he was pitched off headlong into the brush. Before I could set my
feet, my span followed them across the ditch; but I managed to rein them
up to a tree trunk, which the wagon tongue struck heavily. There I held
them, though they still plunged and snorted in their terror.

Willis's team was running away along the lumber trail, but before it had
gone fifty yards we heard a crash, and then a horrible squealing. The
wagon had gone over a log or a stump and, upsetting, had spilled all ten
hogs into the brushwood.

Willis now jumped to his feet and ran to help me master my team, which
was still plunging violently, and I kept it headed to the tree while he
got the halters and tied the horses. Just then we heard that terrible
_Hough--hough!_ again, nearer now. Looking out toward the road, we saw
four teams dragging large, gaudily painted cages that contained animals.
The drivers, who wore a kind of red uniform, pulled up and sat looking
in our direction, laughing and shouting derisively. That exasperated us
so greatly that, checking our first impulse to run in pursuit of the
horses and hogs, we rushed to the road to remonstrate.

It was not a full-fledged circus and menagerie, but merely a show on its
way from one county fair to another. In one cage the