So there was no delay about serving the judge's breakfast or about clearing the table afterward. For that one morning, anyhow, the breakfast dishes went unwashed. Even as the judge put on his straw hat and came out on the front porch, the back door was already discharging Jeff and Aunt Dilsey. By the time the judge had traversed the shady yard and unlatched the front gate, Jeff was halfway to the showground and mending his gait all the time. Less than five minutes later Jeff was being ordered, somewhat rudely, off the side of a boarded-up cage, upon which he had climbed with a view to ascertaining, by a peep through the barred air-vent under the driver's seat, whether the mysterious creature inside looked as strange as it smelled; and less than five minutes after that, Jeff, having reached a working understanding with the custodian of the cage, who likewise happened to be in charge of certain ring stock, was convoying a string of trick ponies to the water-trough over by the planing mill. Aunt Dilsey, moving more slowly--yet guided, nevertheless, by a sure instinct--presently anchored herself at the precise spot where the sideshow tent would stand. Here several lodge sisters soon joined her. They formed a comfortable brown clump, stationary in the midst of many brisk; activities. The judge stood at his gate a minute, lighting his corncob pipe. As he stood there a farm wagon clattered by, coming in from the country. Its bed was full of kitchen chairs and the kitchen chairs contained a family, including two pretty country girls in their teens, who were dressed in fluttering white with a plenitude of red and blue ribbons. The head of the family, driving, returned the judge's waved greeting somewhat stiffly. It was plain that his person was chafed and his whole being put under restraint by the fell influences of a Sunday coat and the hard collar that was buttoned on to the neckband of his blue shirt. His pipe being lighted, the judge headed leisurely in the same direction that the laden farm wagon had taken. Along Clay Street from the judge's house to the main part of town, where the business houses and the stores centered, was a mile walk nearly, up a fairly steepish hill and down again, but shaded well all the way by water maples and silver-leaf trees. There weren't more than eight houses or ten along Clay Street, and these, with the exception of the judge's roomy, white-porched house standing aloof in its two acres of poorly kept lawn, were all little two-room frame houses, each in a small, bare inclosure of its own, with wide, weed-grown spaces between it and its next-door neighbors. These were the homes of those who in a city would haye been tenement dwellers. In front of them stretched narrow wooden sidewalks, dappled now with patches of shadow and of soft, warm sunshine.