roundabout
inside out, and rolling your trousers up as far as they would go; but
what a fellow wanted to make him a real circus actor was a long pair of
white cotton stockings, and I never knew a fellow that got a pair; I
heard of many a fellow who was said to have got a pair; but when you
came down to the fact, they vanished like ghosts when you try to verify
them. I believe the fellows always expected to get them out of a
bureau-drawer or the clothes-line at home, but failed. In most other
ways, a boy's circus was always a failure, like most other things boys
undertake. They usually broke up under the strain of rivalry; everybody
wanted to be the clown or ring-master; or else the boy they got the barn
of behaved badly, and went into the house crying, and all the fellows
had to run.

There were only two kinds of show known by that name in the Boy's Town:
a Nigger Show, or a performance of burnt-cork minstrels; and an Animal
Show, or a strolling menagerie; and the boys always meant a menagerie
when they spoke of a show, unless they said just what sort of show. The
only perfect joy on earth in the way of an entertainment, of course, was
a circus, but after the circus the show came unquestionably next. It
made a processional entry into the town almost as impressive as the
circus's, and the boys went out to meet it beyond the corporation line
in the same way. It always had two elephants, at least, and four or five
camels, and sometimes there was a giraffe. These headed the procession,
the elephants in the very front, with their keepers at their heads, and
then the camels led by halters dangling from their sneering lips and
contemptuous noses. After these began to come the show-wagons, with
pictures on their sides, very flattered portraits of the wild beasts and
birds inside; lions first, then tigers (never meaner than Royal Bengal
ones, which the boys understood to be a superior breed), then leopards,
then pumas and panthers; then bears, then jackals and hyenas; then bears
and wolves; then kangaroos, musk-oxen, deer, and such harmless cattle;
and then ostriches, emus, lyre-birds, birds-of-Paradise and all the
rest. From time to time the boys ran back from the elephants and camels
to get what good they could out of the scenes in which these hidden
wonders were dramatized in acts of rapine or the chase, but they always
came forward to the elephants and camels again. Even with them they had
to endure a degree of denial, for