He had hardly got seated when, from the farther side of the tent, there entered a gorgeous carriage drawn by a pair of milk-white horses.  When the carriage got around in front of him, Jerry saw that it contained Mr. Burrows, the man who had let him carry water for the elephants even if he was too young, but he didn’t pay much attention to him, for there was such a variety of different things to absorb his attention,—­beautiful women in richly colored garments on horses and on sober, humpbacked camels, and even in little houses on the elephants, just as he had seen them in the street parade.

There was the sword-swallower and the fat lady, the giant and the dwarf, and so many other things that Jerry couldn’t remember them all.  When the last of them had passed out at the other side of the tent, he became aware of a smell that was most enticing, quite different from the smell of the circus,—­the sawdust and the animals and the crowd.  He had just identified it as the smell of freshly roasted peanuts when a boy in a white coat in the aisle asked if anybody there wanted freshly roasted peanuts for five cents, only a half a dime.

Jerry did, and after watching other small boys buying bags of the delicacy, he fished out the dime from his blouse pocket and gave it to the boy, who handed him back a bag of peanuts and a nickel.

Jerry had just cracked his first peanut shell and was munching the two nuts in it when he suddenly became aware that the circus was going on.  In fact, there was so much going on that he could not see it all.  He watched the trapeze performers for a minute, swinging and turning somersaults and throwing each other about in the air, and then his eyes wandered to the acrobats going through the most surprising contortions on a platform.  He hadn’t seen half enough of that when his attention was captured by the form of a woman sliding down a wire that went clear to the top of the tent and she was not holding on to the wire at all!  She was hanging from it by her teeth!  He expected to see her dash into the crowd of people when she reached the end of the wire, but two men stopped her.

Fast and furiously the circus stunts were performed.  Men in shaggy trousers on horses threw ropes about each other and picked up handkerchiefs from the ground while their horses were running lickety-split.  They just leaned over in the saddle until Jerry thought they were falling off, and picked up the handkerchiefs.

And there was a tight-rope walker.  It was a woman with no skirts on at all, and the rope was way up much higher than a man’s head and she didn’t touch the ground with her balancing pole at all.  Nora could never walk the rope like that.  And the dancing ponies and the trained seals and the dog that wound in and out among the spokes of a buggy wheel and all the other acts thrilled Jerry and made him almost dizzy, they came so fast; but best of all he liked the clowns with their funny faces and droll antics.  He did not pick out Whiteface the first time the clowns came out, there were so many of them and they looked so much alike with their white faces and red mouths.