“Well, you’re not going to throw any water on me!”

“Yes I can if Bunny Brown says so!  It’s his circus!”

Tom White, Jimmie Kenny and Ned Johnson were talking together in one corner of the barn.  Ned wanted to be a clown, and throw water on some one else.  Jimmie did not want to be the one to get wet, nor did Tom White.

“Bunny, can’t I be a clown?” asked Ned.

“I’m going to be a wild animal trainer—­make-believe!” exclaimed Sue, “and I’m going to be near the cage where the blue-striped tiger is.  I’m going to make him roar.”

Sallie Smith looked a bit scared.

“Oh, it’s only make-believe,” Sue explained.

“Yes, I know,” said Sallie.  “But—­Oh, dear! a blue-striped tiger!”

“Oh, it’s only our big dog Splash,” went on Sue.  “First I was only going to let Bunny stripe his half of Splash.  But a half a blue-striped tiger would look funny, so I said he could make my half of Splash striped too.  It will wash off, for it’s only bluing, like mother puts on the clothes.”

“And we’re going to have a striped zebra, too,” said Bunny.

“Oh, let’s see it!” begged the three boys.

“It’s only one of grandpa’s calves,” cried Sue, “but it really has green stripes on it.  Bunny put them on, and they’re green paint, and they won’t come off ’till they wear off, grandpa says, and the calf ran away, and kicked Bunny over and——­”

“Oh, Sue, don’t tell everything!” cried Bunny.  “You’ll spoil the show.”

“Let’s see the striped calf!” begged the three boys.

“No, we’ve got to practise for the circus,” Bunny insisted.  “Now I’ll do my trapeze act,” and he climbed up to the bar that hung by the long ropes from the beam in the barn.

“I want to do a trapeze act, too!” cried Tom White.

“Say, we can’t all do the same thing!” Bunny said.  “That isn’t like a real circus.  It’s got to be different acts.”

“Oh, say!” cried Ned Johnson.  “I know what I can do!  I can ride you in a wheelbarrow, Tom, and upset you.  That will make ’em all laugh.”

“It won’t make me laugh, if you upset me too hard!” declared Tom.

“I’ll spread some hay on the floor, like the time I did when Bunny fell,” said Sue.  “Then you won’t be hurt.  It doesn’t hurt to fall on hay; does it, Bunny?”

“Nope.”

“All right.  Ned can upset me out of the wheelbarrow if he does it on the hay,” agreed Tom.

So those two boys began to practise this part of the circus, while Bunny swung from the trapeze.  Jimmie Kenny said he would climb up as high as he could and slide down a rope, like a sailor.

“I’ll have some hay under me, too, so if I slip I won’t be hurt,” he said.

Indeed, if it had not been for the big piles of soft hay in grandpa’s barn I don’t know what the little circus performers would have done.

While the boys were practising the things they were going to do, Sue and her little girl friends made up a little act of their own.