She was greatly missed by little Oliver October. For some reason—perhaps she did not explain it herself—at any rate, she did not go to the trouble of speculating—she had taken a tremendous fancy to the child. He was a lively, amusing little chap who laughed gleefully at her antics and was ever ready for more—a complimentary spirit that constantly supplied kindling for her own unquenchable fires. She romped with him, told marvelous stories to him, sang for him and danced for him—and just about the time she was making ready to leave Rumley guiltily showed him how to turn a “cartwheel”! He was very much impressed by this astonishing bit of acrobatics, and as she faced him, her face crimson and her eyes sparkling, he paid her a doubtful but fulsome compliment by saying he’d bet his mother couldn’t do it, nor any other lady in town, either. She made him promise not to tell anybody—and he was never, _never_ to ask her to do it again, because she was getting very old and the next time she might fall and break her neck, and he wouldn’t like that, would he? This small boy of five or six was the only being in town with whom she could play to her heart’s content, and she made the most of him. Her own tiny baby interested but did not amuse her. In the first place, she had not wanted a baby at all, and in the second place since she _had_ to have one she could not understand why she had not had a boy. It wasn’t quite fair. She liked boy babies. It was something to be the mother of a man-child—something to be proud of. She even went so far as to say to herself that she never could have run way and left her baby if it had been a boy. She would have been ashamed to have a son of hers know that his mother had not quite played the game. She was fond of Jane but it was not as hard to leave her as it would have been had she been a boy. Of that she was absolutely certain. Oliver October could not understand why he was not allowed to mention “Aunt” Josephine’s name in the presence of “Uncle” Herbert. His mother and Mrs. Serepta Grimes—who, by the way, was still an ever-present help in time of trouble—gave him very strict orders and repeated them so often that he never had a chance to forget them. But when he found out in a roundabout way that Mrs. Sage had gone off to join a show, he at once assumed—and quite naturally, too—that she was with Barnum’s Biggest Show on Earth, and lived in joyous anticipation of seeing her when the great three-ring circus came to the nearby county seat for its biennial visit. Moreover, he was very firm in his determination to run away from home and join the show, a secret decision that called for unusual industry on his part in the matter of mastering the “cartwheel” and other startling feats of skill, such as standing on his head, walking on his hands, turning somersaults off of a sill in the haymow, and standing upright on the capacious hindquarters of patient old Rosy down at Uncle Silas Link’s livery stable.