This season, though, a culminating treat had been provided by the management: The lesser gymnasts had done their stunts. Now, to the head of the runway mounted the premier tumbler. He stood there grandly erect in his rose-colored fleshings, his arms folded across his swelling breast and his head almost touching the sagging canvas of the tentroof. The band, for the moment, stopped playing. The ringmaster mounted the ring-back and proclaimed that Johnnie O’Brien, foremost athlete of the world, would now perform his death-defying and unparalleled feat of turning a triple somersault over two elephants, three camels and four horses! For many this announcement had a special interest; they knew Johnnie O’Brien was a native-born son of our town. So an expectant hush fell upon the assemblage. Mrs. Slawson turned to Mrs. Ream, and in the silence her voice rose as she asked: “What did he say?” Mrs. Ream brought the blunderbus end of Mrs. Slawson’s ear-trumpet to her lips and, through its sinuous black length, in a voice so shrill that instantly every head there was turned toward the pair of them, she answered: “He says that that pretty man up yonder with the pink clothes on is goin’ to jump over all those animals without hurtin’ himself!” On the sawdust, in his baggy white clothes, squatted one of the clowns. On the instant he leaped to his feet, ran to the head of the larger elephant, and in both hands seized that creature’s long black dangling trunk which now, as everyone saw, looked so amazingly like Mrs. Slawson’s ear-trumpet, and raising its tip to his mouth he shrieked out in a magnificent imitation of Mrs. Ream’s falsetto notes: “He says that that there pretty man up yonder with the pink clothes——” If he finished the sentence, none there heard him. From every side of the arena there arose a tremendous gasp of joyous appreciation and, overtopping and engulfing this, a universal roar of laughter which billowed the tent. Strong men dropped through the seats like ripened plums from the bough and lay upon the earth choking with laughter. The performers rolled about in the ring. And through it all Mrs. Slawson and Mrs. Ream sat there wondering why the band did not play and why the pretty man in the pink clothes up at the top of the runway seemed to be having a convulsion. [THE END] * * * * * Transcriber’s Note: A few obvious punctuation errors have been corrected without note. Four stories were missing from the Contents and have been added, 119, 306, 342 and 366. [End of _A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away_ by Irvin S. Cobb]