[Illustration:  Piggy Pennington ... galloped his father’s fat delivery horse up and down the alley.]

[Illustration:  Oil made by hanging a bottle of angle-worms in the sun to fry.]

[Illustration:  How many bags of carpet rags went to the ragman.]

Now, among children of a larger growth, in festive times hostile demonstrations cease; animosities are buried; but in Boyville a North-ender is a North-ender, a South-ender is a South-ender, and a meeting of the two is a fight.  Boyville knows no times of truce.  It asks nor offers quarter.  When warring clans come together, be it workday, holiday, or even circus day, there is a clatter of clods, a patter of feet, and retreating hoots of defiance.  And because the circus bill-boards were frequented by boys of all kiths and clans, clashes occurred frequently, and Bud Perkins, who was the fighter of the South End, had many a call to arms.  Indeed, the approaching circus unloosed the dogs of war rather than nestled the dove of peace.  For Bud Perkins, in a moment of pride, issued an ukase which forbade all North End boys to look at a certain bill-board near his home.  This ukase and his strict enforcement of it made him the target of North End wrath.  Little Miss Morgan, his foster-mother, who had adopted him at the death of his father the summer before the circus bills were posted, could not understand how the lad managed to lose so many buttons, nor how he kept tearing his clothes.  She ascribed these things to his antecedents and to his deficient training.  She did not know that Bud, whom she called Henry, and whose music on the mouth-organ seemed to come from a shy and gentle soul, was the Terror of the South End.  Her guileless mind held no place for the important fact that North End boys generally travelled by her door in pairs for safety.  Such is the blindness of women.  Cupid probably got his defective vision from his mother’s side of the house.

The last half of the last week before circus day seemed a century to Bud and his friends.  Friday and Saturday crept by, and Mealy Jones was the only boy at Sunday-school who knew the Golden Text, for an inflammatory rumor that the circus was unloading from the side-track at the depot swept over the boys’ side of the Sunday-school room, and consumed all knowledge of the fifth chapter of Acts, the day’s lesson.  After Sunday-school the boys broke for the circus grounds.  There they feasted their gluttonous eyes upon the canvas-covered chariots, and the elephants, and the camels, and the spotted ponies, passing from the cars to the tents.  The unfamiliar noises, the sight of the rising “sea of canvas,” the touch of mysterious wagons containing so many wonders, and the intoxicating smell that comes only with much canvas, many animals, and the unpacking of Pandora’s box, stuffed the boys’ senses until they viewed with utter stoicism the passing dinner hour and the prospect of finding only cold mashed potatoes and the necks and backs of chickens in the cupboards.  They even affected indifference to parental scoldings, and lingered about the enchanting spot until the shadows fell eastward and the day was old.