With Teddie the movies were still strictly taboo, but having secretly visited the Hippodrome with her Uncle Chandler, she became the victim of a brief but burning passion to go on the stage, preferably in tank-work, whereby she might startle the world through the grace of her aquatic feats. When she proceeded to perfect herself in this calling, however, by practising diving in the deeper end of the Lily Pond, she was given castor-oil and sent to bed to obviate a perhaps fatal cold which gave no slightest signs of putting in an appearance. Her spirit was scotched, but not killed, for when, duly chaperoned, she was permitted to visit the Garden and see Barnum & Bailey’s in all its glory, she decided to run away with the circus and wear spangled tights and do trapeze-work under the Big Top. She even escaped from official guardianship long enough to offer a burly elephant-feeder two thoroughbred Shetland ponies and what was left of her spending-money for the privilege of being smuggled away in one of the band-wagons. The burly feeder took pains to explain that their next move was into winter quarters at Providence, but gravely assured the rapt-eyed girl that he’d fix the thing up for her, once they went out under canvas again in the spring. So for months poor deluded Teddie secretly and sedulously practised chinning the bar and skin-the-cat and the muscle-grind, together with divers other aerial contortions, only to learn, when the crocuses bloomed again, that elephant-feeders weren’t persons one could always depend upon.