"Snoring; and that proves just what I said, for you understood me just as plainly as though I had spoken in English," returned the corporal, his eyes still tightly closed in sleep. "Snore me another poem," said Jimmieboy. "No, I won't do that; but if you wish me to I'll snore you a fairy tale," answered the corporal. "That will be lovely," said Jimmieboy. "I love fairy tales." "Very well," observed the corporal, turning over on his back and throwing his head back into an uncomfortable position so that he could snore more loudly. "Here goes. Once upon a time there was a small boy named Tom whose parents were so poor and so honest that they could not afford to give him money enough to go to the circus when it came to town, which made him very wretched and unhappy, because all the other little boys who lived thereabouts were more fortunately situated, and had bought tickets for the very first performance. Tom cried all night and went about the town moaning all day, for he did want to see the elephant whose picture was on the fences that could hold itself up on its hind tail; the man who could toss five-hundred-pound cannon balls in the air and catch them on top of his head as they came down; the trick horse that could jump over a fence forty feet high without disturbing the two-year-old wonder Pattycake who sat in a rocking-chair on his back. As Tom very well said, these were things one had to see to believe, and now they were coming, and just because he could not get fifty cents he could not see them. "Then he thought, 'Here! why can't I go out into the world, and by hard work earn the fifty cents I so much need to take me through the doors of the circus tent into the presence of these marvelous creatures?' "And he went out and called upon a great lawyer and asked him if he did not want a partner in his business for a day, but the lawyer only laughed and told him to go to the doctor and ask him. So Tom went to the doctor, and the doctor said he did not want a partner, but he did want a boy to take medicines for him and tell him what they tasted like, and he promised Tom fifty cents if he would be that boy for a day, and Tom said he would try.