Reminiscences of a Gymnast—Training and Practising—A Professional Rendezvous—Circus Agencies—The First Engagement—Springthorp’s Music-hall—Newsome’s Circus—Reception in the Dressing-room—The Company and the Stud—The Newsome Family—Miss Newsome’s Wonderful Leap across a green lane—The Handkerchief Trick—An Equine Veteran from the Crimea—Engagement to travel. The picture of circus life and manners which I have endeavoured to portray would not be complete without a narrative of the professional experiences of the performers engaged in circuses. I shall next, therefore, present the reminiscences of a gymnast, as I heard them related a few years ago by one who has since retired from the avocation; and I shall endeavour to do so, as nearly as may be possible, in his own words. ‘I was not born and bred a circus man, as most of them are—Alf Burgess, for instance, who was born, as I may say, in the saw-dust, and brought up on the back of a horse. Neither was my partner. He was a clerk in the advertising department of a London evening newspaper, and I was an apprentice in a London printing-office, and not quite out of my time, when we went in for gymnastics at the Alhambra gymnasium. My partner was practising the flying trapeze, and was just beginning to do his flights with confidence, when that poor fellow fell, and broke his back, at the Canterbury, and the proprietors of the London music-halls set their faces against the flying trapeze, and would not engage gymnasts for it. In consequence of that, he had to drop the flying trapeze, and practise for the fixed trapeze; and, as the single trapeze doesn’t draw, he began to look out for a partner, to do it double. Price was looking out for a partner at the same time, but, as he was more advanced in his training than Fred was, and was not disposed to wait till he was proficient, he took Joe Welsh,—Alhambra Joe, as he used to be called,—and Fred had to look out for somebody else. ‘The partnership of the Brothers Price, as they called themselves, did not last long; for Price dropped in for a slice of luck, in the shape of a thumping legacy,—twenty thousand pounds, I have heard,—and then he turned up the profession, and Joe Welsh went in for the long flight. In the mean time, I had made up my mind to follow Fred’s example, and to be his partner; and, besides fixing up the ropes for the flying rings in my grandmother’s orchard at Norwood, for practice on Sundays, we took our fakements nearly every evening to the “ruins,” as they were called, in Victoria Street. Do you know where I mean?’