world is
pretty much made already; success consists in adjustment. Don't try to
make your world, adjust yourself to it. Don't fight the world, serve it
till you master it." Cameron determined he would study adjustments; his
fighting tendency, which had brought him little success in the past, he
would control.

At this point the throb of a band broke in upon his meditations and
summoned him from his bed. He sprang to the window. It was circus day
and the morning parade, in all its mingled and cosmopolitan glory, was
slowly evolving its animated length to the strains of bands of music.
There were bands on horses and bands on chariots, and at the tail of the
procession a fearful and wonderful instrument bearing the euphonious and
classic name of the "calliope," whose chief function seemed to be that
of terrifying the farmers' horses into frantic and determined attempts
to escape from these horrid alarms of the city to the peaceful haunts of
their rural solitudes.

Cameron was still boy enough to hurry through his morning duties in
order that he might mix with the crowd and share the perennial delights
which a circus affords. The stable yard attached to his hotel was lined
three deep with buggies, carriages, and lumber waggons, which had borne
in the crowds of farmers from the country. The hotel was thronged with
sturdy red-faced farm lads, looking hot and uncomfortable in their
unaccustomed Sunday suits, gorgeous in their rainbow ties, and rakish
with their hats set at all angles upon their elaborately brushed heads.
Older men, too, bearded and staid, moved with silent and self-respecting
dignity through the crowds, gazing with quiet and observant eyes upon
the shifting phantasmagoria that filled the circus grounds and the
streets nearby. With these, too, there mingled a few of both old and
young who, with bacchanalian enthusiasm, were swaggering their way
through the crowds, each followed by a company of friends good-naturedly
tolerant or solicitously careful.

Cameron's eyes, roving over the multitude, fell upon a little group that
held his attention, the principal figure of which was a tall middle aged
man with a good-natured face, adorned with a rugged grey chin whisker,
who was loudly declaiming to a younger companion with a hard face and
very wide awake, "My name's Tom Haley; ye can't come over me."

"Ye bet yer life they can't. Ye ain't no chicken!" exclaimed his
hard-faced friend. "Say, let's liquor up once mo