"They weren't clowns!" Susy stamped her foot. "Clowns have white faces, an' funny clothes, an' there were two real clowns helpin' get these men out, they stopped bein' funny an' were awful scared 'cos the p'liceman couldn't swim, an' he floated round on top of the water, an' when he got hold of the rope he was so heavy the clowns couldn't pull him out an' _they_ fell in, too." "That's so," said Charley Carter, with a serious countenance, as he recalled the catastrophe; "an' a man that sat in front of me said he knew the first countryman,--the one with the umbreller--he lives over in Rowley." There was a ring of truth about this which made Ed and me subside, and as Charley Carter had attracted the attention of the assemblage, he tried to hold the floor. "When they got the perliceman out--" But Susy had no intention to let any one else tell the story. She took it up at that point. "--he was all drownded, an' they put him down on the ground, an' begun to roll him round, an' one of the countrymen went an' got a big pop-squirt, oh, ten times bigger than any you ever saw, an' filled it with water, an' squirted it right in the p'liceman's face, an' that made him mad, an' he jumped up an' chased the countryman round the tent with his stick, an' at last the countryman ran out through the place where the horses an' riders come in, an' I don't know whether he caught him or not." "What did the other countryman do?" asked Flossie Mason. "I don't know; the chariots came by then, an' I didn't see 'em after that." Joe Carter then made his first offering to the conversation. "Ben Spaulding drank eight glasses of lemonade,--four pink and four yellow." The irrelevance of this bit of gossip did not make it any the less interesting to us. Instead, it gave Susy a chance to play once more her favorite rôle of prophetess of woe. "Pink lemonade's made of coachyneel, an' that's deadly poison. My mother knew a boy that drank pink lemonade an' died of it." "I don't believe it," put in Harry Fletcher. And he added, in a tremulous tone: "I drank two glasses of it." We all turned and looked at Harry, as at one who would not long be with us. "How do you feel?" asked the elder Carter. "All right," replied Harry; but he had a sickly expression about the mouth. He turned a little aside, and did not seem to take any further interest in the conversation. "I gave two bars of pop-corn to the ellerphants," announced Susy, "but I don't like 'em very well. They're all covered with dust an' they curl their trunks at you. I--" "An elephant's trunk is called his bosphorus," said Minnie, anxious to grace the occasion by a little learning. And she added: "My teacher told me so."