So to the humble employee of the circus who wanders with it from place to place, one day in one town and the next perhaps one hundred miles distant for a period of more than thirty weeks, is a part of the strange daily life, witnesses the emergencies constantly met and dealt with and the perplexing obstacles overcome, comes a forcible and convincing knowledge that it is not an ungodly thing to be questioned and looked at askance, but a genial, legitimate, business enterprise, based upon sound principles and conducted upon the highest lines of ability and responsibility by men who assumed a risk at which the nerviest professional gambler would hesitate. The amount of capital invested is several million dollars; no insurance company will give protection. The dangers of the road are never absent. A cataclysm of damage suits is a constant peril. Rainy weather, preventing performance and profit, may be a companion for months. There must be constant renewal of costly perishable property. Deaths of costly rare animals may swallow up the receipts of days. Continual other dangers and losses, of whose frequency, gravity, and magnitude the general public has no adequate conception, are encountered. Against these ruining possibilities the circus stakes. * * * * * There is a popular misapprehension regarding the profits of the circus business. Some of the large organizations have continued in existence for periods of several years without returning a cent on the investment or at an actual operating loss. Less strongly financed tented shows succumb. The circus is an infallible register of the monetary condition of the country. Hard times are reflected in it, and prosperity fills it with joyous evidence. The daily expenses of our circus are placed by the management at over $5,000, and a moment’s calculation discloses that the receipt of this amount of money is not the quick operation surface conditions often indicate. The average daily free admissions are eleven hundred. These are largely the tickets given for bill-posting privileges. This territory embraces, generally, forty miles on the lines of all converging railroads and a distance of twenty miles in both directions from the tracks. City officials, newspapers, and a throng of others claim the remaining gratuitous entrance passes. Sometimes the number is larger. In one city we have been obliged to place three thousand free tickets.