Suddenly, a sound as of kettledrums and cymbals and squeaking violins rose above the neighing and braying of the fair. In front of Santa Giustina were a circus and a wild-beast show and a crowd of lesser jugglers and charlatans. Outside the circus-booth, high up on a platform, stood the clowns in their dingy fleshings and faded scarlet trunks. They blew furiously on great brass trumpets until their cheeks were purple and nigh to bursting under all the ghastly chalk. There were _ballerine_ in draggled pink tarletan petticoats and low white bodices that made their bony necks and brawny arms still browner by contrast. They had honest, unpainted faces, and wore their hair screwed up tightly on the tops of their heads. They bore traces of exposure to wind and rain. Their eyes had a kind of wistful look, as though they were tired of all this noise and foolery, and wished themselves back again on the old olive-farms with their toiling mothers. There was something in their dogged mouths and the resolute manner in which they thumped the big drums and clashed the great brass cymbals that told of the threshing of grain and the treading of the winepress. There were gorgeous matrons in threadbare velvet and tattered lace head-dresses who cast glances of sweetness upon the unresponsive crowd, and cheered on the panting clowns to cry out at the top of their poor strained lungs, "Avanti, signori! avanti!" Small lithe children clothed in pink tights, with jewelled crowns on their heads, darted in and out among the curtains of the tent, and gazed with a royal air upon the open-eyed, wondering little peasants, rough-shod and clothed in homespun, who stood and worshipped them.