A Showman's Gratitude

It must have been in or about the year , 1830 that a peripatetic circus company pitchod their tent in the village of Staunton, in the Yalley of Virginia, for the proiits to be reaped from the patronage of country gentry, yokel, and plantation hands, and gave such an entertainment of light fantastic equestrianism, athletic contortion, and ground and lofty tumbling as has not yet lost its periodical zest for rural neighborhoods. The small village inn and every other receptacle for transitory guests in the place were taxed to give tetnporary domicile to the small army of show people ; but one there was of the cavalcade who, instead of billeting with his coinrades, took the first opportunity to slip away from both tent and village, and follow a road winding afar aniong retifed plantations. This was a mere boy, haggard and precociously rueful of glance and figure, e&caping from a bondage in which frequent stripes had not been wanting to uiake him something lower than a horee in nightly feats of the arena. Things had come to such a pitch in hia maltreated young life that he preferred a future of beggary on foot to the last countered tinsel of the beggar on horseback, and upon reaching the stately Britingham plantation he began his new career by asking at thé door for a glass of water. The sight of a white boy on tramp was a novelty, for that part of the country inthose patriarchical days, and henee the whole household, with the planter at their head, were attracted to the scène. Upon being kindly questioned by old Mr. Britingham, the fugitive Smike of the circus frankly revealed his story and situation, and that with a piteous earnestness of speech and manner which might have extorted sympathy from the roughest phase of human nature. His response was an offer of immediate refuge and protection in the good old, hearty, hospitable style, and the whimper with' which he accepted did him no harm in the estimation of his new friends. Henceforth the runaway of the ring was a priviJeged in mate of the fine house for a year, enjoying every kindness that benevolence could devise ; but at the end of that period, when another circus was tented in neighboring Staunton, and he went there with the throng to see, the iunuence of the old habit proved stronger in hia nature than the newer ambition, and the boy bemg naturally of sawduat to the sawdust returned, not, however, without something gained for the ment tor his wnolo tuture nte, in a sennnient of ardent gratitude to his benefactors, and an ardor to exoel in his natural lot for the honor of that benefioent emotion. Only a circus-rider was he again, to be sure, but the something of better sphere of Hfe with whieh he went back to horses and clowns was a something potential to make him rise above the creatures of meaner experience. By skill as a performer, sobriety of private character, and a shrewdness not the less effectual tor its honesty, his progresa through the reinaining years of his minority was a continual ascent, and in his twenty-first year he had attained the dignitiea of manager and proprietor. Many times in these prosperous days he brought liis thriving circus to Staunton, and always improved opportunity to present himself at the hospitable door where a simple glass of water had been the lens through which his friendless boyhood had caught its first view of the world's clearer face. The same-welcome was there still ; the Baine disposition in his own heart to whimper ; and " God blcss you !" sounded in it all. The desolation of war supplanted the tent of the showman with that of the soldier in the once happy valley at last, and Sheridau rode to slaüghter where erst the peaceful vaulter through hoops had urged his spangled steed in the merry round of the ring. While the circus still gathered golden gain in distant uninvaded States, fire and sword ranged in tempesta around the home of the Britinghams, until smokeblackenea chiumeys marked the place where tüat home had been, and the churohyard closed upon the aged eyes most mourniul for the desolation. Not until the spring of 1870 could the circus man, now well advanced in years himself, hear aught of the surviving family that, upon the destruction of their homestead and the death of their chief, had wandered away from the old plantation. At the time mentioned, when the now mammoth equestrian enterprise was giving entertainments in Kansas, a poorly dressed, hollow-cheeked man applied for BOme unskilled employment about the tenta. " Your name," said the rich showman, ' is Britingham." There could be but one answer, reluctantly givun : "Yes." With a strange look the rich proprietor grasped both hands of the other in his own : " Then" said he, " you are the son of the best man that ever hved, and I thank God that you have come to share in all that your father has a mortgage upon for eternity. Take my tent, my people, niy horses, my bank book, and then you'll hare just the interest of the one unpaid debt of my life." Here was good feeling and no rnistake ; the kind of feeling that needs some sort of unexpectedness of origln to make it perfectly sublime, and just enough of the commonness of commou natures about it to excuse nature's common way of betraying its simplest effect. The two men cried over eaoh other without the slightest regard to sex, and then the Southerner begged off as well as he could by finally consenting to accept a loan - only that - of $5,000 for the purchase of the farm. The Yankee would not " let up orv hiin," to use his own words, a cent cheapcr, and added a season ticket to the show for the whole family. Two years later the aforesaid out-aud-out double-twisted, dyed-in-the-wool Down-Easter was at Washington with his " city of tents," chromatic posters, unrivalled array of talent, and other epizootic symptoms. One night after the performance he was aitting in the room of his hotel, making merry with certain-friends, when a carel was handed him by a waiter, followed by its immediately invited owner, Mr. Britingham, of Kansas, now in a high state of agrioultural aftiuence, who had called to pay back that loan, on his way to Virginia to see what could be done tor the restoration of the old place. " He wants to pay me back, gentlemen - pay me back !" ejaculated the showman, by way of general introduction to the company. "Why, heaven bless you, my boy, if it was twenty-five thousand I'd dodge you as many years to make you keep it - and a hundred thousand more. You're the son of the best man that ever lived ; a man that made a man of me ; and I'd like to seo myself paid baok."