ly in.
Unmindful of a sudden anxious command from her rider, she swung her
foreparts this way and that. She was looking for it. It must be directly
hereabouts somewhere. In those ancient days of her youthful vagabondage
it had always been close at hand when that tune--her own tune--was
played.

Then above the heads of the crowd she saw it--a scuffed circlet of earth
measuring exactly fifty-two feet across and marking the location where
the middle ring had been builded when Runyon & Bulger's Mighty United
Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual
Spring engagement. That had been in early May and this was summer's
third month; the attrition of the weather had worn down the sharp edges
of that low turfen parapet; by rights, too, there should have been much
sawdust and much smell of the same and a center pole rising like one
lone blasted tree from the exact middle of a circular island of this
sawdust; there should have been a ringmaster and at least two clowns and
an orderly clutter of paraphernalia. Nevertheless there before her was
the middle ring. And the music had started. And Mittie May answered the
cue which had lived in her brain for fifteen long years and more, just
as always she answered it, or sought to, when that tune smote her
eardrums.

The startled spectators gave backward and to either side in scrambling
retreat as she lunged forward, cleaving a passage for herself to the
proper spot of entrance. She whisked in. Around the ring she sped, her
hoofs drumming against the flanks of the ring-back, her barrel slanting
far over in obedience to the laws of centripetal force, her tail
rippling out behind her like a homebound pennon in a fair breeze--around
and around and yet again and then some more.

To be sure there were irregularities in the procedure. Upon her back,
springily erect, there should have been a jaunty equestrian swinging a
gay pink leg in air and anon uttering the traditional _Hoop-la_. Instead
there was a heavy bulk which embraced her neck with two strong arms,
which wallowed about on her spinal column, which continually cried out
entreaties, threats, commands, even profanities. Yet with Mittie May,
as with most of us, habit was stronger than all else. She knew her duty
as of old. She did it. Accommodating her gait to the quickening measures
of the music, she stretched her legs, passing out of a rolling gallop
into a hard run. Yet one more thing, or rather the lack of it,