The night overland journeys of these old-time circuses were full of dire peril. Highways were dark and dreary and places of pitfalls. Each circus wagon bore a flickering candle torch, showing the route to the driver behind. Soon menageries were added, and then an elephant. Hannibal, the “war elephant,” was one of the first. There were few nights when his services were not required to extricate a wagon from mud or gully, or to urge it up some steep incline. The old Van Amburg circus transported a giraffe, a mournful beast which few modern circuses are possessed of. Wood choppers went ahead to clear the road with their axes and permit the passage of the high cage. Then came, in order of time, the side-show, with the free exhibition in front--wire-walking, a balloon ascension, a high-diving performance, or feats on the “flying” trapeze. Probably the most noted knight of the sawdust ring was Dan Rice, who died in Long Branch, N. J., on February 22, 1900, at the age of seventy-seven years. His history was practically that of the circus--the real old-fashioned circus--in America. Daniel McLaren, his father, nicknamed him Dan Rice, after a famous clown he had known in Ireland, and the name clung to him. He touched the heights and depths of circus luck, making in his life three independent fortunes and losing one after another. He died comparatively poor. As acrobat and later clown, he travelled every portion of the United States and extensively in Europe. He first appeared as a clown in Galena, Ill., the home of U. S. Grant, in 1844, and from that time his popularity as a circus clown increased amazingly. He retired in 1882, a hale old man of sturdy frame and resonant voice, whose hearty handshake it was a pleasure to feel. Bobby Williams, Sam Lathrop, Sam Long, Joe Pentland, Billy Kennedy, Jimmy Reynolds, William Wallett, Frank Brown, Nat Austin, Herbert Williams, Dan Gardiner, Bill Worrell and Tony Pastor were other noted clowns and “Shakespearian jesters” of his day, and most of them are hale and hearty to this day. A press agent of their time, not behind his lavish-languaged modern brother, called attention to this group as “jolly, jovial representatives of Momus, whose fund of wit and humor has given them the proud titles of America’s greatest wits and punsters; scholarly, refined and every one fit to grace the proudest court as its greatest jester. Merrier men within the limits becoming mirth live not upon man’s footstool--this greatest earth.” [Illustration: HUMILIATION OF THE KING OF BEASTS.]