Oldport Days

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will appear in her wonderful feats at each performance.
MONS. COMSTOCK,
THE CHAMPION SWORD-SWALLOWER,

will also exhibit his wonderful power of swallowing Five Swords,
measuring from 14 to 22 inches in length.
It is not so much the beauty of this feat
that makes it so remarkable, as its seeming
impossibility.
----
MASTER BOBBY,
THE BANJO SOLOIST AND BURLESQUE.
----
COMIC ACROBAT,
BY MISS GERTY AND MONS. COMSTOCK.
----
MADAM DELIA,
THE WONDERFUL AND ORIGINAL SNAKE-TAMER, with her Pets, measuring
12 feet in length and weighing 50 lbs.
A pet Rattlesnake, 15 years of age, captured
on the Prairies of Illinois,--
oldest on exhibition.
----
In connection with this Exhibition there are
ANT-EATERS, AFRICAN MONKEYS, &C.
Cosmoramic Stereoscopic Scenes in the United States and
other Countries, including a view of
the Funeral Procession of President Taylor,
which is alone worth the price
of admission.
----
Exhibition every half-hour, during day and evening.
Secure your seats early!
----
ADMISSION 20 CENTS. Particular care will be taken and
nothing shall occur to offend the most fastidious.

Stephen and his little sister strolled about the tent meanwhile.
The final preparations went slowly on. The few spectators teased
the ant-eater in one corner, or the first violin in another. One
or two young farmers' boys were a little uproarious with egg-pop,
and danced awkward breakdowns at the end of the tent. Then a
cracked bell sounded and the curtain rose, showing hardly more of
the stage than was plainly visible before.

Little Gerty, aged ten, came in first, all rumpled gauze and
tarnished spangles, to sing. In a poor little voice, feebler and
shriller than the chattering of the monkeys, she sang a song
about the "Grecian Bend," and enacted the same, walking round and
round the stage whirling her tawdry finery. Then Anne, aged
twelve, came in as a boy and joined her. Both the girls had
rather pretty features, blue eyes, and tightly curling hair; both
had pleasing faces; but Anne was solid and phlegmatic, while
Gerty was keen and flexible as a weasel, and almost as thin.
Presently Anne went out and reappeared as "Master Bobby" of the
hills, making love to Gerty in that capacity, through song and
dance. Then Gerty was transformed by the addition of a single
scarf into a "Highland Maid," and danced a fling; this quite
gracefully, to the music of two violins. Exeunt the children and
enter "Madam Delia and her pets."

The show-woman had laid aside her velvet sack and appeared with
bare neck and arms. Over her shoulders hung a rattlesnake fifteen
feet long, while a smaller specimen curled from each hand. The
reptiles put their cold, triangular faces against hers, they
touched her lips, they squirmed around her; she tied their tails
together in elastic knots that soon undid; they reared their
heads above her black locks till she looked like a stage Medusa,
then laid themselves lovingly on her shoulder, and hissed at the
audience. Then she lay down on the stage and pillowed her head on
the writhing mass. She opened her black bag and took out a tiny
brown snake which she placidly transferred to her bosom; then
turned to a barrel into which she plunged her arm and drew out a
black, hissing coil of mingled heads and tails. Her keen,
goodnatured face looked cheerfully at the audience through it
all, and took away the feeling of disgust, and something of the
excitement of fear.

The lady and the pets retiring, Gerty's hour of glory came. She
hated singing and only half enjoyed character dancing, but in
posturing she was in her glory. Dressed in soiled tights that
showed every movement of her little body, she threw herself upon
the stage with a hand-spring, then kissed her hand to the
audience, and followed this by a back-somerset. Then she touched
her head by anslow effort to her heels; then turned away, put her
palms to the ground, raised her heels gradually in the air, and
in this inverted position kissed first one hand, then the other,
to the spectators. Then she crossed the stage in a series of
somersets, then rolled back like a wheel; then held a hoop in her
two hands and put her whole slender body through it, limb after
limb. Then appeared Monsieur Comstock. He threw a hand-spring and
gave her his feet to stand upon; she grasped them with her hands
and inverted herself, her feet pointing skyward. Then he resumed
the ordinary attitude of rational beings and she lay on her back
across his uplifted palms, which supported her neck and feet;
then she curled herself backward around his waist, almost
touching head and heels. Indeed, whatever the snakes had done to
Madam Delia, Gerty seemed possessed with a wish to do to Monsieur
Comstock, all but the kissing. Then that eminent foreigner
vanished, and the odors of his pipe came faintly through the
tattered curtain, while Anne entered to help Gerty in the higher
branches.

A double trapeze--just two horizontal bars suspended at different
heights by ropes and straps--had been swung from the tent-roof.
Gerty ascended to the upper bar, hung from it by her hand, then
by her knees, then by her feet, then sat upon it, leaned slowly
backward, suddenly dropped, and as some children in the audience
shrieked in terror, she caught by her feet in the side-ropes and
came up smiling. It was a part of the play. Then another trapeze
was hung, and was set swinging toward the first, and Gerty flung
herself in triumph, with varied somersets, from one to the other,
while Anne rattled the banjo below and sang,
"I fly through the air with the greatest of ease,
A daring young man on the flying trapeeze."

Then the child stopped to rest, while all hands were clapped and
only the unreverberating turf kept the feet from echoing also.
People flocked in from outside, and Madam Delia was kept busy at
the door. Then Gerty came down to the lower bar, while Anne
ascended the upper, and hung to it solidly by her knees. Thus
suspended, she put out her hands to Gerty, who put her feet into
them, and hung head-downward. There was a shuddering pause, while
the two children clung thus dizzily, but the audience had seen
enough of peril to lose all fear.

"Those straps are safe?" asked Stephen of Mr. De Marsan.

"Law bless you, yes," replied that pleasant functionary.
"Comstock's been on 'em,"

Precisely as he spoke one of the straps gave downward a little,
and then rested firm; it was not a half-inch, but it jarred the
performers.

"Gerty, I'm slipping," cried Anne. "We shall fall!"

"No, we sha'n't, silly," said the other, quickly. "Hold on.
Comstock, swing me the rope."

Stephen Blake sprang to the stage and swung her the rope by which
they had climbed to the upper bar. It fell short and Gerty missed
it. Anne screamed, and slipped visibly.

"You can't hold," said Gerty. "Let go my feet. Let me drop."

"You'll be killed," called Anne, slipping still more.

"Drop me, I say!" shouted the resolute Gerty, while the whole
audience rose in excitement. Instantly the hands of the elder
girl opened and down fell Gerty, headforemost, full twelve feet,
striking heavily on her shoulder, while Anne, relieved of the
weight, recovered easily her position and slipped down into
Stephen's arms. She threw herself down beside the little comrade
whose presence of mind had saved at least one of them.

"O Gerty, are you killed?" she said.

"I want Delia," gasped the child.

Madam Delia was at her side already, having rushed from the door,
where a surging host of boys had already swept in gratis. Gerty
writhed in pain. Stephen felt her collar-bone and found it bent
like a horseshoe; and she fainted before she could be taken from
the stage.

When restored, she was quite exhausted, and lay for days
perfectly subdued and gentle, sleeping most of the time. During
these days she had many visitors, and Mr. De Marsan had ample
opportunity for the simple enjoyments of his life, tobacco and
conversation. Stephen Blake and his sister came often, and while
she brought her small treasures to amuse Gerty, he freely pumped
the proprietor. Madam Delia had been in the snake business, it
appeared, since early youth, thirteen years ago. She had been in
De Marsan's employ for eight years before her marriage, and his
equal and lawful partner for five years since. At first they had
travelled as side-show to a circus, but that was not so good.

"The way is, you see," said Mr. De Marsan, "to take a place like
Providence, that's a good showtown, right along, and pitch your
tent and live there. Keep-still pays, they say. You'd have to
hire a piece of ground anywhere, for five or six dollars a day,
and it don't cost much more by the week. You can board for four
or five dollars a week, but if you board by the day it's a dollar
and a half." To which words of practical wisdom Stephen listened
with pleased interest. It was not so very many years since he had
been young enough to wish to run away with a circus; and by
encouraging these simple confidences, he brought round the
conversation to the children.

But here he was met by a sheer absence of all information as to
their antecedents. The original and deceitful Comstock had
brought them and left them two years before. Madam Delia had
received flattering offers to take her snakes and Gerty into
circuses and large museums, but she had refused for the child's
own sake. Did Gerty like it? Yes, she would like to be posturing
all day; she could do anything she saw done; she "never needed to
be taught nothin'," as Mr. De Marsan asserted with vigorous
accumulation of negatives. He thought her father or mother must
have been in the business, she took to it so easily; but she was
just as smart at school in the winter, and at everything else.
Was the life good for her? Yes, why not? Rough company and bad
language? They could hear worse talk every day in the street.
"Sometimes a feller would come in with too much liquor aboard,"
the showman admitted, "and would begin to talk his nonsense; but
Comstock wouldn't ask nothin' better than to pitch such a feller
out, especially if he should sarce the little gals. They were
good little gals, and Delia set store by 'em."

When Stephen and his sister went back that night to their kind
hostesses, Miss Martha and Miss Amy, the soft hearts of those
dear old ladies were melted in an instant by the story of Gerty's
courage and self-sacrifice. They had lived peacefully all their
lives in that motherly old house by the bay-side, where
successive generations had lived before them. The painted tiles
around the open fire looked as if their fops and fine ladies had
stepped out of the Spectator and the Tatler; the great mahogany
chairs looked as hospitable as when the French officers were
quartered in the house during the Revolution, and its Quaker
owner, Miss Martha's grand-uncle, had carried out a seat that the
weary sentinel might sit down. Descended from one of those
families of Quaker beauties whom De Lauzun celebrated, they bore
the memory of those romantic lives, as something very sacred, in
hearts which perhaps held as genuine romances of their own. Miss
Martha's sweet face was softened by advancing deafness and by
that gentle, appealing look which comes when mind and memory grow
a little dimmer, though the loving nature knows no change.
"Sister Amy says," she meekly confessed, "that I am losing my
memory. But I do not care very much. There are so few things
worth remembering!"

They kept house together in sweet accord, and were indeed trained
in the neat Quaker ways so thoroughly, that they always worked by
the same methods. In opinion and emotion they were almost
duplicates. Yet the world holds no absolute and perfect
correspondence, and it is useless to affect to conceal--what was
apparent to any intimate guest--that there was one domestic
question on which perfect sympathy was wanting. During their
whole lives they had never been able to take precisely the same
view of the best method of grinding Indian meal. Miss Martha
preferred to have it from a wind-mill; while Miss Amy was too
conscientious to deny that she thought it better when prepared by
a water-mill. She said firmly, though gently, that it seemed to
her "less gritty."

Living their whole lives in this scarcely broken harmony by the
margin of the bay, they had long built together one castle in the
air. They had talked of it for many an hour by their evening
fire, and they had looked from their chamber windows toward the
Red Light upon Rose Island to see if it were coming true. This
vision was, that they were to awake some morning after an
autumnal storm, and to find an unknown vessel ashore behind the
house, without name or crew or passengers; only there was to be
one sleeping child, with aristocratic features and a few yards of
exquisite embroidery. Years had passed, and their lives were
waning, without a glimpse of that precious waif of gentle blood.
Once in an October night Miss Martha had been awakened by a
crash, and looking out had seen that their pier had been carried
away, and that a dark vessel lay stranded with her bowsprit in
the kitchen window. But daylight revealed the schooner Polly
Lawton, with a cargo of coal, and the dream remained unfulfilled.
They had never revealed it, except to each other.

Moved by a natural sympathy, Miss Martha went with Stephen to see
the injured child. Gerty lay asleep on a rather dingy little
mattress, with Mr. Comstock's overcoat rolled beneath her head. A
day's illness will commonly make even the coarsest child look
refined and interesting; and Gerty's physical organization was
anything but coarse. Her pretty hair curled softly round her
head; her delicate profile was relieved against the rough, dark
pillow; and the tips of her little pink ears could not have been
improved by art, though they might have been by soap and water.
Warm tears came into Miss Martha's eyes, which were quickly
followed from corresponding fountains in Madam Delia's.

"Thy own child?" said or rather signalled Miss Martha, forming
the letters softly with her lips. Stephen had his own reasons for
leaving her to ask this question in all ignorance.

"No, ma'am," said the show-woman. "Not much. Adopted."

"Does thee know her parents?" This was similarly signalled.

"No," said Madam Delia, rather coldly.

"Does thee suppose that they were--"

And here Miss Martha stopped, and the color came as suddenly and
warmly to her cheeks as if Monsieur Comstock had offered to marry
her, and to settle upon her the snakes as exclusive property.
Madam Delia divined the question; she had so often found herself
trying to guess the social position of Gerty's parents.

"I don't know as I know," said she, slowly, "whether you ought to
know anythin' about it. But I'll tell you what I know. That
child's folks," she added, mysteriously, "lived on Quality Hill."

"Lived where?" said Miss Martha, breathless.

"Upper crust," said the other, defining her symbol still further.
"No middlins to 'em. Genteel as anybody. Just look here!"

Madam Delia unclasped her leather bag, brought forth from it a
mass of checks and tickets, some bird-seed, a small whip, a
dog-collar, and a dingy morocco box. This held a piece of an
old-fashioned enamelled ring, and a fragment of embroidered
muslin marked "A."

"She'd lived with me six months before she brought 'em," said the
show-woman, whispering.

The bit of handkerchief was enough. Was it a dream? thought the
dear old lady. What the ocean had refused, was this sprite who
had lived between earth and air to fulfil? Miss Martha bent
softly over the bedside, resting her clean glove on the only
dirty mattress it had ever touched, and quietly kissed the child.
Then she looked up with a radiant face of perfect resolution.

"Mrs. De Marsan," said she, with dignity that was almost
solemnity, "I wish to adopt this child. No one can doubt thy
kindness of heart, but thee must see that thee is in no condition
to give her suitable care and Christian nurture."

"That's a fact," interposed Madam Delia with a pang

"Then thee will give her to me?" asked Miss Martha, firmly.

Madam Delia threw her apron over her face, and choked and sobbed
beneath it for several minutes. Then reappearing, "It's what I've
always expected," said she. Then, with a tinge of suspicion,
"Would you have taken her without the ring and handkerchief?"

"Perhaps I should," said the other, gently. "But that seems to
make it a clearer call."

"Fair enough," said Madam Delia, submitting. "I ain't denyin' of
it." Then she reflected and recommenced. "There never was such a
smart performin' child as that since the world began. She can do
just anythin', and just as easy! Time and again I might have
hired her out to a circus, and she glad of the chance, mind you;
but no, I would keep her safe to home. Then when she showed me
the ring and the other things, all my expectations altered very
sudden; I knowed we couldn't keep her, and I began to mistrust
that she would somehow find her folks. I guess my rathers was
that she should, considerin'; but I did wish it had been Anne,
for she ain't got nothin' better in her than just to live
genteel."

"But Anne seems a nice child, too," said Miss Martha,
consolingly.

"Well, that's just what she is," replied Madam Delia, with some
contempt. "But what is she for a contortionist? Ask Comstock what
she's got in her! And how to run the show without Gerty, that's
what beats me. Why, folks begin to complain already that we
advertise swallerin', and yet don't swaller. But never you mind,
ma'am, you shall have Gerty. You shall have her," she added, with
a gulp, "if I have to sell out! Go ahead!" And again the apron
went over her face.

At this point, Gerty waked up with a little murmur, looked up at
Miss Martha's kind face, and smiled a sweet, childish smile. Half
asleep still, she put out one thin, muscular little hand, and
went to sleep as the old lady took it in hers. A kiss awaked her.

"What has thee been dreaming about, my little girl?" said Miss
Martha.

"Angels and things, I guess," said the child, somewhat roused.

"Will thee go home with me and live?" said the lady.

"Yes'm," replied Gerty, and went to sleep again.

Two days later she was well enough to ride to Miss Martha's in a
carriage, escorted by Madam Delia and by Anne, "that dull,
uninteresting child," as Miss Amy had reluctantly described her,
"so different from this graceful Adelaide." This romantic name
was a rapid assumption of the soft-hearted Miss Amy's, but, once
suggested, it was as thoroughly-fixed as if a dozen baptismal
fonts had written it in water.

Madam Delia was sustained, up to the time of Gerty's going, by a
sense of self-sacrifice. But this emotion, like other strong
stimulants, has its reactions. That remorse for a crime committed
in vain, which Dr. Johnson thought the acutest of human emotions,
is hardly more depressing than to discover that we have got
beyond our depth in virtue, and are in water where we really
cannot quite swim,--and this was the good woman's position.
During her whole wandering though blameless life,--in her girlish
days, when she charmed snakes at Meddibemps, or through her brief
time of service as plain Car'line Prouty at the Biddeford mills,
or when she ran away from her step-mother and took refuge among
the Indians at Orono, or later, since she had joined her fate
with that of De Marsan,--she had never been so severely tried.

"That child was so smart," she said, beneath the evening canvas,
to her sympathetic spouse. "I always expected when we got old
we'd kinder retire on a farm or suthin', and let her and her
husband--say Comstock, if he was young enough--run the business.
And even after she showed us the ring and things, I thought
likely she'd just come into her property somewheres and take care
of us. I don't know as I ever thought she'd leave us, either way,
and there she's gone."

"She won't forget us," said the peaceful proprietor.

"No," said the wife, "but it's lonesome. If it had only been
Anne! I shall miss Gerty the worst kind. And it'll kill the
show!"

And to tell the truth, the show languished. Nothing but the happy
acquisition of a Chinese giant nearly eight feet high, with
slanting eyes and a long pigtail,--a man who did penance in his
height for the undue brevity of his undersized nation,--would
have saved the "museum."

Meantime the neat proprieties of orderly life found but a poor
disciple in Gerty. Her warm heart opened to the dear old ladies;
but she found nothing familiar in this phantom of herself, this
well-dressed little girl who, after a rapid convalescence, was
introduced at school and "meeting" under the name of Adelaide.
The school studies did not dismay her, but she played the
jew's-harp at recess, and danced the clog-dance in india-rubbers,
to the dismay of the little Misses Grundy, her companions. In the
calisthenic exercises she threw beanbags with an untamed vigor
that soon ripped the stitches of the bags, and sowed those
vegetables in every crack of the school-room floor. There was a
ladder in the garden, and it was some comfort to ascend it hand
over hand upon the under side, or to hang by her toes from the
upper rung, to the terror of her schoolmates.

But she became ashamed of the hardness of her palms, and she grew
in general weary of her life. Her clothes pinched her, so did her
new boots; Madam Delia had gone to Providence with the show, and
Gerty had not so much as seen the new Chinese giant.

Of all days Sunday was the most objectionable, when she had to
sit still in Friends' Meeting and think how pleasant it would be
to hang by the knees, head downward, from the parapet of the
gallery. She liked better the Seamen's Bethel, near by, where
there was an aroma of tar and tarpaulin that suggested the odors
of the show-tent, and where, when the Methodist exhorter gave out
the hymn, "Howl, howl, ye winds of night," the choir rendered it
with such vigor that it was like being at sea in a northeaster.
But each week made her new life harder, until, having cried
herself asleep one Saturday evening, she rose early the next
morning for her orisons, which, I regret to say, were as
follows:--

"I must get out of this," quoth Gerty, "I must cut and run. I'll
make it all right for the old ladies, for I'll send 'em Anne.
She'll like it here first rate."

She hunted up such remnants of her original wardrobe as had been
thought worth washing and preserving, and having put them on,
together with a hat whose trimmings had been vehemently burned by
Miss Martha, she set out to seek her fortune. Of all her new
possessions, she took only a pair of boots, and those she carried
in her hand as she crept softly down stairs.

"Save us!" exclaimed Biddy, who had been to a Mission Mass of
incredible length, and was already sweeping the doorsteps.
"Christmas!" she added, as a still more pious ejaculation, when
the child said, "Good by, Biddy, I'm off now."

"Where to, thin?" exclaimed Biddy.

"To Providence," said Gerty. "But don't you tell."

"But ye can't go the morn's mornin'," said Biddy. "It's Sunday
and there's no cars."

"There's legs," replied the child, briefly, as she closed the
door.

"It's much as iver," said the stumpy Hibernian, to herself, as
she watched the twinkling retreat of those slim, but vigorous
little members.

They had been Gerty's support too long, in body and estate, for
her to shrink from trusting them in a walk of a dozen or a score
of miles. But the locomotion of Stephen's horse was quicker, and
she did not get seriously tired before being overtaken, and--not
without difficulty and some hot tears--coaxed back. Fortunately,
Madam Delia came down from Providence that evening, on a very
unexpected visit, and at the confidential hour of bedtime the
child's heart was opened and made a revelation.

"Won't you be mad, if I tell you something?" she said to Madam
Delia, abruptly,

"No," said the show-woman, with surprise.

"Won't you let Comstock box my ears?"

"I'll box his if he does," was the indignant answer. The gravest
contest that had ever arisen in the museum was when Monsieur
Comstock, teased beyond endurance, had thus taken the law into
his own hands.

"Well," said Gerty, after a pause, "I ain't a great lady, no more
'n nothin'. Them things I brought to you was Anne's."

"Anne's things?" gasped Madam Delia,--"the ring and the piece of
a handkerchief."

"Yes, 'm," said Gerty, "and I've got the rest." And exploring her
little trunk, she produced from a slit in the lining the other
half of the ring, with the name "Anne Deering."

"You naughty, naughty girl!" said Madam Delia. "How did you get
'em away from Anne?"

"Coaxed her," said the child.

"Well, how did you make her hush up about it?"

"Told her I'd kill her if she said a single word," said Gerty,
undauntedly. "I showed her Pa De Marsan's old dirk-knife and told
her I'd stick it into her if she didn't hush. She was just such a
'fraid-cat she believed me. She might have known I didn't mean
nothin'. Now she can have 'em and be a lady. She was always
tallkin' about bein' a lady, and that put it into my head."

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