Betty Lamb remained in the town, a fine figure of a woman, but bowed in the shoulders, dirty, and clad in rags.  At last, when her strong defiance of poverty and need would no longer serve her, she was seen to go about from door to door in the early dawn, raking among the ashes for such articles as she chose to put in an old sack and carry upon her back.  The townsfolk honestly thought that all had been done that could be done to make a decent woman of her, and now in her old age she must needs go down to the gutter.

One day a man came to the town with circus pictures and a bucket of paste.  He pasted his pictures upon all the blank spaces of walls which he could find.  Great was the joy of the children who stood and stared, their little hearts made glad by novelty and colour.  Great was the surprise of the older folk, who said, ’It is a new thing in the world when so great a show as this comes out of the accustomed track of shows to erect its tent in our small town!’ Yet so it was; from some whim of the manager, or of some one who had the ear of the manager, the thing was decreed.

Upon these circus pictures there figured, in a series of many wonderful harlequin attitudes, a certain Signor Lambetti.  Very foreign was the curl of his hair and the waxen ends of his moustache; very magnificent was his physique; he wore the finest of silken tights and crimson small clothes, and medals were depicted hanging upon his breast.

When at length the circus came for that one night’s entertainment and the huge tent was set up upon the common not far from the old red ruin, all the town flocked to see the brilliant spectacle.  The minister was there, and what was more, his wife and daughters too; they were far grander than he was, and wore silken furbelows and fringed shawls.  The minister paid for the best seats for them to sit in.  All the shopkeepers were there; every man, woman and child in all the town who could find as much as sixpence to pay for standing room was there.  But the strangest circumstance was that before the show began a man went out from the brightly-lit doorway and called in a loud voice to the beggars and little ragged boys and girls who had come to survey the tent on the outside, and he brought them all in and gave them a good part of the tent to sit in, although they had not sixpence to pay, nor even a penny.

Ah! in those days it was a very grand sight.  There were elephants who performed tricks, and camels who walked about with men and bundles on their backs just as they do in eastern deserts, and there were wonderful ladies who dressed and behaved like fairies, and who rode standing tip-toe on the backs of horses and jumped through swinging rings.  But the crowd had not read the circus bills and the newspapers from all the neighbouring cities for nothing.  They were a canny Scotch crowd; they were not to be taken in by mere glitter, no, not the smallest barefoot boy nor the most wretched beggar, for they knew very well that the real crisis of the evening was to be the appearance of Signor Lambetti, and the word ‘wonderful’ was not to be spoken until his feats began to be performed.