Polly of the Circus | Page 8

evening. Again and again it had dragged her
from her work to the study window, from which she could see the
wonders so tantalisingly near. Mandy was housekeeper for the Rev.
John Douglas, but the unwashed supper dishes did not trouble her, as

she watched the lumbering elephants, the restless lions, the
long-necked giraffes and the striped zebras, that came and went in the
nearby circus lot. And yet, in spite of her own curiosity, she could not
forgive her vagrant "worse half," Hasty, who had been lured from duty
early in the day. She had once dubbed him Hasty, in a spirit of derision,
and the name had clung to him. The sarcasm seemed doubly
appropriate to-night, for he had been away since ten that morning, and
it was now past nine.
The young pastor for a time had enjoyed Mandy's tirades against her
husband, but when she began calling shrilly out of the window to
chance acquaintances for news of him, he slipped quietly into the next
room to finish to-morrow's sermon. Mandy renewed her operations at
the window with increased vigour when the pastor had gone. She was
barely saved from pitching head foremost into the lot, by the timely
arrival of Deacon Strong's daughter, who managed, with difficulty, to
connect the excited woman's feet with the floor.
"Foh de Lor' sake!" Mandy gasped, as she stood panting for breath and
blinking at the pretty, young, apple-faced Julia; "I was suah most gone
dat time." Then followed another outburst against the delinquent Hasty.
But the deacon's daughter did not hear; her eyes were already
wandering anxiously to the lights and the tinsel of the little world
beyond the window.
This was not the first time to-day that Mandy had found herself talking
to space. There had been a steady stream of callers at the parsonage
since eleven that morning, but she had long ago confided to the pastor
that she suspected their reasons.
"Dey comes in here a-trackin' up my floors," she said, "and a-askin'
why you don' stop de circus from a-showin' nex' to de church and den
a-cranin' afar necks out de winder, till I can't get no housework done."
"That's only human nature," Douglas had answered with a laugh; but
Mandy had declared that she knew another name for it, and had
mumbled something about "hypocritters," as she seized her broom and

began to sweep imaginary tracks from in front of the door.
Many times she had made up her mind to let the next caller know just
what she thought of "hypocritters," but her determination was usually
weakened by her still greater desire to excite increased wonder in the
faces of her visitors.
Divided between these two inclinations, she gazed at Julia now; the
shining eyes of the deacon's daughter conquered, and she launched
forth into an eager description of how she had just seen a "wondeful
striped anamule" with a "pow'ful long neck walk right out of the tent,"
and how he had "come apart afore her very eyes," and two men had
slipped "right out a' his insides." Mandy was so carried away by her
own eloquence and so busy showing Julia the sights beyond the
window, that she did not hear Miss Perkins, the thin-lipped spinster,
who entered, followed by the Widow Willoughby dragging her
seven-year-old son Willie by the hand.
The women were protesting because their choir practice of "What Shall
the Harvest Be?" had been interrupted by the unrequested
acompaniment{sic} of the "hoochie coochie" from the nearby circus
band.
"It's scandalous!" Miss Perkins snapped. "Scandalous! And
SOMEBODY ought to stop it." She glanced about with an
unmistakable air of grievance at the closed doors, feeling that the pastor
was undoubtedly behind one of them, when he ought to be out taking
action against the things that her soul abominated.
"Well, I'm sure I'VE done all that I could," piped the widow, with a
meek, martyred air. She was always martyred. She considered it an
appropriate attitude for a widow. "He can't blame ME if the choir is out
of key to-morrow." "Mercy me!" interrupted the spinster, "if there isn't
Julia Strong a-leaning right out of that window a-looking at the circus,
and her pa a deacon of the church, and this the house of the pastor. It's
shocking! I must go to her."
"Ma, let me see, too," begged Willie, as he tugged at his mother's skirts.

Mrs. Willoughby hesitated. Miss Perkins was certainly taking a long
while for her argument with Julia. The glow from the red powder
outside the window was positively alarming.
"Dear me!" she said, "I wonder if there can be a fire." And with this
pretext for investigation, she, too, joined the little group at the window.
A few moments later when Douglas entered for a