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.