An instant later the tree was deserted, and five boys were running as fast as their legs would carry them toward the thick of the town.  They stopped at the new pine bill-board, and did not leave the man with the paste bucket until they had seen “Zazell” flying out of the cannon’s mouth, the iron-jawed woman performing her marvels, the red-mouthed rhinoceros with the bleeding native impaled upon its horn and the fleeing hunters near by, “the largest elephant in captivity,” carrying the ten-thousand dollar beauty, the acrobats whirling through space, James Robinson turning handsprings on his dapple-gray steed, and, last and most ravishing of all, little Willie Sells in pink tights on his three charging Shetland ponies, whose breakneck course in the picture followed one whichever way he turned.  When these glories had been pasted upon the wall and had been discussed to the point of cynicism, the Court of Boyville reluctantly adjourned to get in the night wood and dream of a wilderness of monkeys.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

During the two weeks after the appearance of the glad tidings on the bill-boards, the boys of Willow Creek spent many hours in strange habiliments, making grotesque imitations of the spectacles upon the boards.  Piggy Pennington rolled his trousers far above his knees for tights, and galloped his father’s fat delivery horse up and down the alley, riding sideways, standing, and backwards, with much vainglory.  To simulate the motley of the tight-rope-walking clown, Jimmy Sears wore the calico lining of his clothes outside, when he was in the royal castle beyond his mother’s ken.  Mealy donned carpet slippers in Pennington’s barn, and wore long pink-and-white striped stockings of a suspiciously feminine appearance, fastened to his abbreviated shirt waist with stocking-suspenders, hated of all boys.  Abe Carpenter, in a bathing-trunk, did shudder-breeding trapeze tricks, and Bud Perkins, who nightly rubbed himself limber in oil made by hanging a bottle of angle-worms in the sun to fry, wore his red calico base-ball clothes, and went through keg-hoops in a dozen different ways.  In the streets of the town the youngsters appeared disguised as ordinary boys.  They revelled in the pictured visions of the circus, but were sceptical about the literal fulfilment of some of the promises made on the bills.  Certain things advertised were eliminated from reasonable expectation:  for instance, the boys all knew that the giraffe would not be discovered eating off the top of a cocoanut-tree; nor would the monkeys play a brass band; and they knew that they would not see the “Human Fly” walk on the ceiling at the “concert.”  For no boy has ever saved enough money to buy a ticket to the “concert.”  Nevertheless, they gloated over the pictures of the herd of giraffes and the monkey-band and the graceful “Human Fly” walking upside down “defying the laws of gravitation;” and they considered no future, however pleasant, after the day and date on the bills.  Thus the golden day approached, looming larger and larger upon the horizon as it came.  In the interim, how many a druggist bought his own bottles the third and fourth time, how many a junk-dealer paid for his own iron, how many bags of carpet rags went to the ragman, the world will never know.