It seemed that the latter had loaned Mr. Wildwood some money for his scientific experiments.  As repayment, when he died, she took the cottage and what else was left of the wreck of his former fortune.

Even this she claimed did not pay her up in full, and she made poor Andy feel all the time that he was eating the bread of charity.

Andy’s grandfather had been a famous sailor.  Andy had read an old private account among his father’s papers of a momentous voyage his grandfather had made to the Antarctic circle.

He loved to picture his ancestor among the ship’s rigging.  He had an additional enthusiasm in another description of his father’s balloon venture.

Andy wished he had been born to fly.  He seemed to have inherited a sort of natural acrobatic tendency.  At ten years of age he was the best boy runner and jumper in the village.

The first circus he had seen—­not with Miss Lavinia’s permission—­set Andy fairly wild, and later astonished his playmates with prodigious feats of walking on a barrel, somersaulting, vaulting with a pole, and numerous other amateur gymnastic attainments.

For the past month a circus, now exhibiting in a neighboring town, had been advertised in glowing prose and lurid pictures on big billboards all over the county.

Juvenile Fairview was set on fire anew with the circus fever.  Andy’s rope-walking feat and double somersault act from desk to desk that morning had resulted, getting him into the trouble of his life.  It furthermore had interrupted other performances on the programme listed for later on that very day.

Andy’s head had been full of the circus since he had seen its first poster at a cross-roads.  He could never pass a heap of sawdust without cutting a caper.

In the spelling contest, he had stupefied his fellow students by nimbly rattling over such words as “megatherian,” “stupendous,” “zoological aggregation,” and the like.

One of his sums covered the number of yards a clown could cover in a given time on a handspring basis.  He had shocked the schoolmaster by handing in an essay on “The Art of Bareback Riding.”

Andy had tried every acrobatic trick he had seen depicted in the glowing advance sheets announcing the circus.  To repeated efforts in this direction his admiring schoolmates had continually incited him.

He had tried the double somersault in the schoolroom that morning.  Andy had made a famous success of the experiment, but with the direful result of smashing a desk, and subsequent expulsion.

Thinking over all this, Andy realized that the beginning and end of all his troubles was his irrepressible tendency towards acrobatic performances.

“And I simply can’t help it!” he cried in a kind of reckless despair.  “It’s born in me, I guess.  Oh, don’t I hope Aunt Lavinia turns me out, as she has often threatened to do.  Say, if she only would, and I could join some show, and travel and see things and—­live!”