After the night performance, they return to their private cars, which are by that time prepared to start for another town as soon as the tents and other paraphernalia are aboard. Week after week of this routine, as regularly carried out as the work of a factory, requires physical stamina as well as the actual gymnastic or acrobatic circus faculty, for which a clear brain is the most requisite. These things are not maintained except by regular living. The motto of the circus acrobat, therefore, might be “plain living and high jumping.” Beneath the white canvas, as under the brick and iron of city office buildings, there is no room for those who complain. “Headaches” and similar excuses for a non-appearance must for disciplinary reasons be frowned upon by the equestrian director--the stage manager of the circus. It is the “circus mother” who pleads with him to excuse the women who are not able to appear. She it is to whom they go with griefs and complaints and upon whose sympathy in their concern they may rely. Frivolity, even in the innocuous guise of a waiting maid, is discouraged in circus life, and no woman performer, be she ever so celebrated, is allowed to carry a handmaiden to aid in dressing her. “No room for ’em,” is the terse but eloquent excuse of the management. Circuses of the better class look after the welfare of their woman performers with a surprising regard to detail. They are provided with a special car in which they live while on the road, except when the show plays a three-night or week’s stand; in that case they are quartered in a hotel. How very comfortable their travelling quarters may be they are nevertheless pleased when an opportunity is had to spend a few days in a room which affords sufficient space to allow of unpacking and repacking trunks, for in one-night stands the trunk containing personal belongings is never moved except from car to lot. Woman riders frequently own their own horses. It is indeed considered a breach of circus etiquette, or more particularly speaking a lowering of one’s “caste” to be content to ride an animal owned by some one else. The sharp little vibrant “clucks,” with which the equestrienne commands her horse in the ring, are “cues” which he understands as well as he does the swaying of the ringmaster’s whip from left to right, or the pressure of his rider’s satin slipper. Each of these is a suggestion to his memory that brings instant response in some change of movement.