"What's that ye're grumbling about, Humpty Dumpty?" asked the pock-marked Irishman as he came up with his nine-banded armadillo, all ready for the performance. Then in his most professional tones: "If it is the toothache yez have now, I'll be afther curing it entoirely wid wan touch of this baste from----" "Oh, get out!" exclaimed the clown, putting his hand on the tall Irishman's shoulder and springing lightly down from the barrel. "I'm dead sick of all this monkey business. If it wasn't a matter of bread-and-butter I wouldn't laugh again in a year." "Ye couldn't make anybody out there in that big aujence belave it," laughed the Irishman. "They think yer life is wan perpetooal joke; that ye're a joke yerself for that matther, a two-legged wan, done up in cap and bells." "You're right," said the clown bitterly, looking askance at his striped legs. "But 'a man's a man for a' that and a' that,' and he gets tired sometimes of always being taken for a jesting fool. Curse this livery!" The Irishman looked at him shrewdly. "Ye should have gone in for a 'varsity cap and gown, and Oi've been thinking that maybe ye did start out that way." A dull red glowed under the paint on the clown's face, and he ran into the ring in response to the signal without a reply. A thundering round of applause greeted him, which broke out again as he glanced all around with a purposely silly leer. Then he caught sight of Jim's honest face, smiling expectantly on him from one of the front benches. It struck him like a pain that this man could not look through his disguise of tawdry circus trappings, and see that a man's heart was beating under the clown's motley. There came a sudden fierce longing to tear off his outward character of mountebank, for a moment, and show Jim the stifled nature underneath, noble enough to recognize the tender chivalry hidden in the rough exterior of the awkward backwoodsman, and to be claimed by him as a kindred spirit. As he laughed and danced and sang, no one dreamed that his thoughts kept reverting to scenes that the woman's story had called up, or that a plan was slowly shaping in his mind whereby he might serve the homesick old soul waiting out under the oak-tree for the performance to be done.