tom of bill."

Mr. Blyth read this grotesquely shocking narrative with sentiments which
were anything rather than complimentary to the taste, the delicacy, and
the humanity of the fluent Mr. Jubber. He consulted the bottom of the
bill, however, as requested; and ascertained what were the prices
of admission--then glanced at the top, and observed that the first
performance was fixed for that very evening--looked about him absently
for a minute or two--and resolved to be present at it.

Most assuredly, Valentine's resolution did not proceed from that dastard
insensibility to all decent respect for human suffering which could
feast itself on the spectacle of calamity paraded for hire, in the
person of a deaf and dumb child of ten years old. His motives for going
to the circus were stained by no trace of such degradation as this. But
what were they then? That question he himself could not have answered:
it was a common predicament with him not to know his own motives,
generally from not inquiring into them. There are men who run
breathlessly--men who walk cautiously--and men who saunter easily
through the journey of life. Valentine belonged to the latter class;
and, like the rest of his order, often strayed down a new turning,
without being able to realize at the time what purpose it was which
first took him that way. Our destinies shape the future for us out
of strange materials: a traveling circus sufficed them, in the first
instance, to shape a new future for Mr. Blyth.

He first went on to the Rectory to tell them where he was going, and to
get a cup of tea, and then hurried off to the circus, in a field outside
the town.

The performance had begun some time when he got in. The Amazonian
Empress (known otherwise as Miss Florinda Beverley) was dancing
voluptuously on the back of a cantering piebald horse with a Roman nose.
Round and round careered the Empress, beating time on the saddle with
her imperial legs to the tune of "Let the Toast be Dear Woman," played
with intense feeling by the band. Suddenly the melody changed to "See
the Conquering Hero Comes;" the piebald horse increased his speed; the
Empress raised a flag in one hand, and a javelin in the other, and began
slaying invisible enemies in the empty air, at full (circus) gallop. The
result on the audience was prodigious; Mr. Blyth alone sat unmoved. Miss
Florinda Beverley was not even a good model to draw legs from, in the
estimation of this anti-Amazonian