It is the first heavy rainfall of the season that brings the most overwhelming woe. The custom of circus owners is to wash their tents with paraffine at the beginning of each season. The waxy mixture renders the cloth waterproof and preserves it from atmospheric influences. The treatment is not efficacious, however, until the fabric has been thoroughly soaked with rain and succeeding sunshine has dried it out. So it is that a dull dread of approaching calamity fills every professional heart when the initial storm sets in. The water falls upon showman and patron as if no so-called protection was above. A wan and spectral “big top” it is at night, sometimes with vivid lightning filling it with sulphur-smelling blazes, and the frail dressing-room tent clinging to it like a luminous bulb. CHAPTER IV THE PARADE Breakfast over, active preparations are on for the parade. Well-fed horses and ponies in shining harness and waving plumes take their places before glittering vehicles; the sound of music is heard from bands perched hazardously high; clowns, charioteers, jockeys, Roman riders join the line; camels and elephants, some bearing a weight of feminine beauty in Oriental costume, make appearance, and a picturesque cavalcade nearly a mile long is in motion. One of the managers leads the line down to town and back. He has already been over the course once, noting its conditions with caution born of long experience. Sometimes his foresight bids him change the route. A corner is too sharp for the forty-horse team, a hill may be dangerously steep, a bridge too low or unsafe, the road too rough, or perhaps the advance man did not appreciate that at a certain point the parade would “double” on itself. Behind him a drum corps blows and beats, and then Jeanne d’Arc, in polished armor, with clanking curtains of chain mail. The flush of tan is beginning to tint ears and cheeks under her helmet and her two mounted knights are very happy and proud. She is a young woman who was adopted by a wealthy aunt in Pittsburg, who sent her to Europe to keep her from entering circus life. Her sudden return, romantic marriage with a tattooed man, enlistment as a jockey rider in Cedar Rapids, Ia., and rapid rise to the front ranks of equestriennes is a matter circus folk never tire of discussing.