"Better wait," advised Dick, with a smile. "Have a talk with that acrobat. The show is coming to Hamilton Corners to-morrow, and you can ask him how he likes the life." "The show coming to Hamilton Corners?" "Yes," and then Dick told of the arrangements. Hamilton Corners hardly knew itself when it awoke the next morning. The town was gay with many colored posters, showing fierce animals wandering together over vast treeless plains, and many-hued lithographs of men risking their lives on the high trapeze. Before the boys had fairly gotten the idea into their heads that the circus was coming the cavalcade of wagons began arriving. Dick had seen the town authorities and secured the necessary permits. Then Hamilton Corners really woke up as the news became known that Dick was responsible for the whole affair. "Say, he spends money like water," observed Simon to Guy. "I wish I had some of what he's throwing away." "I suppose you'd buy oil stock with it," observed Guy, with a peculiar smile. Simon did not answer. The orphans at the asylum--hundreds of them--could hardly believe the joyous news when, after Dick had told those in charge, it was announced to them by the matrons. Some of the poor little tots cried in very happiness. One little boy, who remembered once seeing some of the gay lithographs of a circus, was discovered running around in a circle. "What are you doing?" asked a matron. "Playing I'm a circus horse," was the answer. "I'se got to do suffin to make de time pass. I'm so happy!" Long before the time set for the performance, crowds of boys and girls were headed for the big tents. Dick had generously arranged so that no boy or girl need pay, and hundreds of those in Hamilton Corners, as well as those in the surrounding suburbs, besides the orphans, saw the show free. Dick wanted to go off with some of his chums and view the performance, but the head matron of the asylum asked him to sit with her in the midst of her little charges. "They want to see you," she explained. "They think you own the circus, and that you are the most wonderful person in the world." "Oh, pshaw! It isn't anything at all," declared Dick, with a blush. "I just happened to think of it when I saw the little children out walking and saw how sad some of 'em looked. Besides, it's time we had a circus in Hamilton Corners." The antics of the clowns, the "hair-raising, death-defying evolutions in mid-air," as the programme called them, the performing horses and elephants, the pony races, the chariot contests, the trick dogs, pigs, monkeys, and other animals, the glittering pageant, the music and excitement--all this was as a happy dream to the orphans. They sat in ecstasy, now and then some of them looking at Dick, who sat in their midst, as though, like some good fairy, they feared he might disappear any minute.