Page 155 - A Little Bush Maid

Perhaps you boys and girls who live in cities, or near townships where
travelling companies pay yearly visits, can have no idea of what this first

circus meant to this little bush maid, who had lived all her twelve years
without seeing anything half so wonderful. Perhaps, too, you are lucky to

have so many chances of seeing things--but it is something to possess
nowadays, even at twelve, the unspoiled, fresh mind that Norah brought to
her first circus.

Everything was absolutely real to her. The clown was a being almost too

good for this world, seeing that his whole time was spent in making people
laugh uproariously, and that he was so wonderfully unselfish in the way he
allowed himself to be kicked and knocked about--always landing in

positions so excruciatingly droll that you quite forgot to ask if he were hurt.
All the ladies who galloped round the ring, and did such marvellous things,

treating a mettled steed as though he were as motionless as a kitchen table,
seemed to Norah models of beauty and grace. There was one who set her
heart beating by her daring, for she not only leaped through a

paper-covered hoop, but through three, one after the other, and
then--marvel of marvels--through one on which the paper was alight and

blazing fiercely! Norah held her breath, expecting to see her scorched and
smouldering at the very least; but the heroic rider galloped on, without
seeming so much as singed. Almost as wonderful was the total indifference

of the horses to the strange sights around them.

"Bobs would be off his head!" said Norah.

She was especially enchanted with a small boy and girl who rode in on the

same brown pony, and had all sorts of capers, as much off the pony’s back
as upon it. Not that it troubled them to be off, because they simply ran,

together, at the pony, and landed simultaneously, standing on his back,
while the gallant steed galloped the more furiously. They hung head
downwards while the pony jumped over hurdles, to their great apparent

danger; they even wrestled, standing, and the girl pitched the boy off to the
accompaniment of loud strains from the band and wild cheers from Cunjee.

Not that the boy minded--he picked himself up and raced the pony
desperately round the ring--the girl standing and shrieking encouragement,