There is no phase of work that requires more patient and faithful study, more steadiness of nerve or a greater command of the muscles than feats of balancing on trapeze, rings and slack wire. To balance well, one must be systematically developed, and each muscle must be ready to act instantly and do its work with certainty. The legs must be strong and firm to sustain the body in its various poses. The back must be sinewy, so that the recovery may be made quickly and the upright maintained without a chance of failure, and the arms and hands must be hard and strong; for when a man, falling from a trapeze, grasps at the bar, he must catch it and hold to it if he desires to emerge unhurt. Balancing on the slack wire is essentially different from trapeze balancing. On the slack wire the balance must be kept by working the body from the waist down, and is mainly done with the legs. It is the reverse on the trapeze, where the legs must be kept rigid and the balance worked from the leg up. The slack wire is harder to learn at first than the trapeze, as it is radically different from a person’s natural balance, which is kept more with the arms and body and less with the legs. The triple somersault has slain its scores, yet as long as men tumble over elephants in the circus, and as long as springboards are made, the acrobats will be trying to accomplish this most difficult of feats. There have been acrobats who have done it. They are dead now. They were carried out of the ring to a hospital immediately thereafter, and lived for the various periods of from one to three days. There have been men who have asserted that they can turn the triple. They are generally the acrobats who have left the circus ring forever and are devoting the last years of their lives to the sale of cigars or some other stirring occupation. The men who have followed the circus all their lives say that no man has ever turned the triple from a springboard and lived to boast of his triumph. The triple somersault is done from a flying trapeze, but it is simply a series of revolutions in the air as the performer drops. Even then it should be called two and a half revolutions, for the acrobat falls on his back in a net and depends upon the rebound to hurl him to his feet. He can make these two revolutions and a half from a springboard, sometimes, with the difference that nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand he alights on his head or on the back of his neck which brings instant death. A man who even falls that way in a net is a subject for the coroner.