ke
proper officers."

But Ellen Ember would not be comforted. She stood with that one hand,
palm outward, pressed against her lips, looking at us with big, brimming
eyes.

"I ain't got nothin' but my craziness, you know," she said over. And
then, as she was going through the gateway, she turned to Doctor June.

"Why, Wednesday's the first night o' the Carnival!" she cried. "You set
the dollar meetin' on the first night o' the Carnival!"

"My stars!" cried Doctor June, gravely. "And I might have been selling
pills on the grounds!"

* * * * *

All Friendship Village loves a Carnival. Once the word meant to me a
Florentine _fiesta_ day, with a feast of colour, and of many little fine
things, "real, like laughter." Now when I say "carnival" I mean the
painted eruption by night from the market square of some town like
Friendship, when lines broaden and waver grotesquely, when the mirth is
in great silhouettes and Colour goes unmasked.

I always make my way to such a place, for it holds for me the wonder of
the untoward; as will a strolling Italian plodding past my house at
night with his big, silent bear; or the spectacle of the huge, faded red
ice-wagon, with powerful horses and rattling chains and tongs, and
giants in blue denim atop the crystal; or the strange, copper world that
dissolves in the fluid of certain sunsets. And that Wednesday night, a
week later, on my way to the "dollar meeting" at Doctor June's, I turned
toward the Friendship Carnival with some vestige of my youth clinging to
the hem of things.

I gave my attention to them all: The pop-corn wagon, an aristocratic
affair that looked like a hearse; the little painted canaries and
love-birds, so out of place and patient that I thought they must have
souls to form as well as we; the sad little live monkey, incessantly
dodging white balls thrown at him by certain immortals (who, when they
hit him, got pipes); and the giant who flung "Look! Look! Look! Look!"
through a megaphone, while a good little dog toiled up a ladder and then
stood at the ladder's top in a silence that was all nice reticence and
dignity. Also, the huge Saxon fellow who, at the portal of the Arabian
Court of Art and Regular Cafe Restaurant, sang a love-song through a
megaphone--"Tenderly, dearest, I breathe thy sweet name," he hallooed,
with his free hand beckoning the crowd to the Court of Art.

And then I saw the Lyric Dance Arcade and Indian Palac