At the extreme end of the long line came the tired little clown on the trick mule. A sorrier-looking object could not be imagined, as he sat with his knees drawn up and his head bent dejectedly down. He did not notice the figure leaning eagerly over the bars, until she called him. Then he looked up with a start. The next instant he had dismounted and was standing bare-headed in the road before her. The moonlight made a halo of her white hair, and lighted up her gentle, aristocratic face with something of its old high-born beauty. "I wanted to thank you," she said, holding out her slender hand to the painted little jester with the gracious dignity that had always been her charm. "You disappeared this afternoon before I could tell you how much your courtesy has done for me and mine." He bowed low over the little hand. "I bid you farewell, sir," she added gently. "The truest gentleman I have met in many a day!" It was the recognition that he had craved. She had seen the man through the motley. He looked up, his face glowing as if that womanly recognition had knighted him; and with the remembrance of that touch resting on him like a royal accolade, he rode on after the procession, into the depths of the moonlighted forest. The Fourth Traveler Wexley Snathers By Way of an Inherited Circus ONLY one question was asked in the streets of Gentryville that afternoon, and it was asked from the Court-house Square to the last corner grocery in the straggling outskirts: "If _you_ were an undertaker like Wexley Snathers, and had a circus left to you by will, what would you do with it?" When the question was worn threadbare in business circles, it was taken home to bandy around the village supper-tables, with the final insistent emphasis, "Well, what _would_ you do, anyhow, if you were in Wex Snathers's place?" It would have been an intense relief to the man in question if the village could have settled the problem for him. Nothing had ever weighed so heavily upon him, not even the responsibilities of his first personally conducted funeral occasion. All the afternoon he sat in the rear of his little coffin shop, floundering again and again through the confusing phrases of a legal document spread out before him. It notified him of the death of one Mortimer Napoleon Bennet, a travelling showman, who had left him heir to possessions valued at several thousands of dollars. So bewildering was the unexpected news and the legal terms in which it was conveyed, that it was some time before Wexley's slow brain grasped the fact that the deceased was not a stranger, but only red-headed "Pole" Bennet, an old play-fellow, who had run away from home over thirty years before. Next, his stumpy forefinger guided his spectacles twice through the entire document before he realized that _he_ was now the owner of all the ungodly goods and chattels enumerated therein.