r artists, the
gymnasts, and the entire audience followed, trailing along behind the
mounted tattooed man, and shouting themselves hoarse with
encouragement or derision.

As Charley rose to the occasion and quickened his pace, the heat of
the sun, the violent exercise of riding bareback, and the nervous
excitement produced by the horror of the situation, threw Nickey into
a profuse sweat. The bluing began to run. The decorations on his
forehead trickled down into his eyes; and as he tried to rub off the
moisture with the back of his hand the indigo was smeared liberally
over his face. His personal identity was hopelessly obscured in the
indigo smudge; and the most vivid imagination could not conjecture
what had happened to the boy. It was by no means an easy feat to
retain his seat on Charley's back; it would have been still more
difficult to dismount, at his steed's brisk pace; and Nickey was most
painfully conscious of his attire, as Charley turned up the road which
led straight to the village. At each corner the procession was
reinforced by a number of village boys who added their quota to the
general uproar and varied the monotony of the proceeding by
occasionally throwing a tin can at the rider on the white horse. When
Charley passed the rectory, and the green, and turned into Church
Street, Nickey felt that he had struck rock bottom of shameful
humiliation.

For many years it had been Charley's habit to take Mrs. Burke down to
church on Wednesday afternoons for the five o'clock service; and
although he had been out of commission and docked for repairs for some
time, his subliminal self must have got in its work, and the old habit
asserted itself: to the church he went, attended at a respectful
distance by the Bearded Lady, the Fat Man, the Snake Charmer, the King
of the Cannibal Islands, the Living Skeleton, and the Wild Man from
Borneo, to say nothing of a large and effective chorus of roaring
villagers bringing up the rear.

It really was quite clever of Charley to recall that, this being
Wednesday, it was the proper day to visit the church,--as clever as it
was disturbing to Nickey when he, too, recalled that it was about
time for the service to be over, and that his mother must be somewhere
on the premises, to say nothing of the assembled mothers of the entire
stock company--and the rector, and the rector's wife.

Mrs. Burke, poor woman, was quite unconscious of what awaited her, as
she emerged from the