Jerry didn’t see how the circus could be much more fascinating than the parade with all its cages open so you could see the animals.  And with the clowns, too, especially the one with the donkey, going through such laughable antics.  But he was a little disappointed that the elephants didn’t jump a fence or do anything like that during the parade.  However, the beautiful ladies in gorgeous raiment who rode in the little houses strapped to the elephants’ backs made him forget about their fence-jumping proclivities.

When the parade was over, Jerry and the Mullarkey children, together with a hundred or more small boys and girls, followed the steam-throated calliope through the principal street of the town out to the tents, fascinated by the loudness of the music and the escape of jets of steam as the player fingered the keys.  It seemed to Jerry that there couldn’t in all the wide world be such heavenly music.  Celia Jane and Chris shared his enthusiasm, but Nora confessed to liking a fiddle better and Danny asserted that the music of the trombone was easier on the ears.

The free exhibition on the little platform outside the side-show tent had all the fascination of the unknown for Jerry and Chris and Celia Jane and Nora, but not for Danny, who had been to the vaudeville theater twice and who knew that this outside sample never could come up to the glories to be revealed inside for fifty cents, or a dollar and a half for reserved seats in the boxes, and was critical.

The dancing girl in short skirts and the man with the beard which fell to his feet and the very red-faced snake charmer merely whetted his appetite for what was to come, while to Jerry and the rest of the Mullarkey children it was a substantial part of the feast itself.

The free show seemed to Jerry not to have much more than started when the raucous voice of the ballyhoo announced: 

“This, ladies and gents, concludes the free show.  The main show will not begin for half an hour, thirty minutes—­just time enough to see the side show, the world’s greatest congress of freaks and monstrosities.  See the sword-swallower from India to whom a steel sword is no more than a string of spaghetti to an Italian.  Kelilah, the famous dancer of the Nile, whose graceful contortions have delighted the eyes and moved the hearts of kings.  See Major Wee-Wee, the smallest man in the world, no bigger than a two-year-old baby, and Tom Morgan, the giant who stands seven feet three inches in his stocking feet.  They are all there—­every kind of human freak from the living skeleton to the fat woman who weighs four hundred pounds.  The price is the same to one and all—­twenty-five cents, only a quarter of a dollar.  This way and get your tickets for the side show.  There is just time to take in all its wonders before the big show in the main tent begins.”

The promise of all these delights proved irresistible to Jerry and Chris and they left the children and were almost first in line, but the ticket taker refused them admittance.