“What are they?” Jerry asked.

“They’re some kind of a fish,” returned Danny promptly.

“Fish nothing!” exclaimed Chris.  “Who ever saw a fish with hair on it?  They’re some kind of animal.”

“They’ve got fins,” retorted Danny.  “I’d like to know what kind of animals’s got fins.  Tell me that.”

“I don’t know,” Chris confessed, “but what kind of fish has hair?”

“This kind,” said Danny authoritatively.

“Mebbe it’s half fish and half animal,” Jerry ventured.

“Who ever heard—­” Danny began but was interrupted by Nora.

“It tells under the picture what they are,” she said.  “Trained s-e-a-l-s, seals.  That’s what rich women get their coats from.”

“Then Jerry can be a trained seal,” said Danny.  “He can have a ball of carpet rags for a balloon to balance on his nose.”

“I don’t think I could,” Jerry protested.  “I know it would fall off.”

“Not if you practise enough,” returned Danny.  “Besides, that’s all that’s left for you.  I guess if one seal can throw it to another and that seal catch it on its nose like it does in the picture, you ought to be able to balance it on your nose.  All you’ll have to do is to lie on your stummick on the ground and throw back your head.”

So it was decided that Jerry should play the part of a trained seal in their circus.  Mother ’Larkey got out a ball of carpet rags, when they reached home, for Jerry to balance on his nose in place of a balloon, and gave Danny an old green wrapper, just ready to be cut up into carpet rags, out of which to make his elephant costume.  She made Chris a clown costume out of a piece of old white skirt upon which she sewed large dots of red and blue cloth.

The two following days were busy ones for Jerry if not quite so happy as for the Mullarkey children.  He had made up his mind, after practising until his back, chest and neck ached from throwing his head back to balance the ball of carpet rags on his nose, that he didn’t like trained seals and wasn’t going to care to be one at the circus.  Chris’s clown costume was finished and looked very much like a white union suit miles too big for him.

Nora had become quite proficient at walking the tight rope, stretched between two poles in the yard about ten feet apart and two feet from the ground, if she remembered to keep one end of her balancing pole touching the ground all the time.  Mrs. Mullarkey had decided that Celia Jane didn’t need any costume to play the part of the dancing pony except her good, white dress that she probably wouldn’t ruin this time as all she had to do was to dance.

Danny was having more than a peck of trouble.  His elephant costume had all sorts of queer mishaps.  He wanted to make it all himself, even to the sewing, and he couldn’t sew for sour apples, as Nora very readily told him.  Two small palm-leaf fans, fastened to an old cap of his father’s so that they flopped with every movement, served as the elephant’s ears, while out of an old brown coat sleeve Danny had fashioned what passed for an elephant’s trunk.  He fastened it with a string to the visor of the cap.