he wanted her to perform with the riders; and I said 'No' at once,
though I was awful frightened of him in those days. But soon after,
Jemmy (who wasn't the clown then that he is now, sir; there was others
to be got for his money, to do what he did at that time)--Jemmy comes to
me, saying he's afraid he shall lose his place, if I don't give in about
Mary. This staggered me a good deal; for I don't know what we should
have done then, if my husband had lost his engagement. And, besides,
there was the poor dear child herself, who was mad to be carried up in
the air on horseback, always begging and praying to be made a little
rider of. And all the rest of 'em in the circus worried and laughed
at me; and, in short, I give in at last against my conscience, but I
couldn't help it.

"I made a bargain, though, that she should only be trusted to the
steadiest, soberest man, and the best rider of the whole lot. They
called him 'Muley' in the bills, and stained his face to make him look
like a Turk, or something of that sort; but his real name was Francis
Yapp, and a very good fatherly sort of man he was in his way, having
a family of his own to look after. He used to ride splendid, at full
straddle, with three horses under him--one foot, you know, sir, being on
the outer horse's back, and one foot on the inner. Him and Jubber made
it out together that he was to act a wild man, flying for his life
across some desert, with his only child, and poor little Mary was to
be the child. They darkened her face to look like his; and put an
outlandish kind of white dress on her; and buckled a red belt round her
waist, with a sort of handle in it for Yapp to hold her by. After first
making believe in all sorts of ways, that him and the child was in
danger of being taken and shot, he had to make believe afterwards that
they had escaped; and to hold her up, in a sort of triumph, at the full
stretch of his arm--galloping round and round the ring all the while. He
was a tremendous strong man, and could do it as easy as I could hold up
a bit of that plum cake.

"Poor little love! she soon got over the first fright of the thing,
and had a sort of mad fondness for it that I never liked to see, for it
wasn't natural to her. Yapp, he said, she'd got the heart of a lion, and
would grow up the finest woman-rider in the world. I was very unhappy
about it, and lived a miserable life, always fearing some accident. But
for some time nothing near an acciden