‘I don’t know whether great writers of Eastern travel would have gone to this circus; but yet it was a strange sight. For aught that one could tell we were about to see all the mishaps of Billy Button’s journey to Brentford represented in their vivid discomfort upon the shores of the Bosphorus, and within range of the sunset shadows from the minarets of St Sophia! The company was a very fair one, and they went through the usual programme of the amphitheatre. One clever fellow threw a bullet in the air, and caught it in a bottle during a “rapid act;” and another twisted himself amongst the rounds and legs of a chair, keeping a glass full of wine in his mouth. They leaped over lengths of stair-carpet, and through hoops, and did painful things as Olympic youths and Lion Vaulters of Arabia. ‘The attraction of the evening, however, was a very handsome girl—Maddalena Guillaume—with a fine Gitana face and exquisite figure. Her performance consisted in clinging to a horse, with merely a strap hung to its side. In this she put one foot, and flew round the ring in the most reckless manner, leaping with the horse over poles and gates, and hanging on, apparently, by nothing, until the fezzes were in a quiver of delight, for her costume was not precisely that of the Stamboul ladies—in fact, very little was left to the imagination.’ I quote this passage for the purpose of showing that the wanderings of the men and women whose vocation it is to entertain the public as equestrians, clowns, acrobats, and jugglers are not confined to the limits within which actors and singers obtain foreign engagements. There are very few men or women of eminence in the profession who have not visited nearly every European capital, and many of them have made the tour of the world. Price’s circus was for many years one of the most popular institutions of Madrid, and the Circo Price was to English circus _artistes_ what Cape Horn is to American seamen. Tell an equestrian or an acrobat that you think you have seen him before, and he will ask, ‘Was it at the Circo Price?’ just as a Yankee sailor will snuffle, ‘I guess it was round the Horn.’ To have appeared at the Hippodrome or the _Cirque Imperiale_ is a very small distinction indeed, when so many have performed in Madrid and Naples, Berlin and St Petersburg, and not a few have traversed the United States from New York to San Francisco, and then crossed the ocean, and performed in Sydney and Melbourne, or Yokohama, Hong Kong, and Calcutta.