Warm and dry and bright under the spreading top with its two "center
poles" and its row of "quarters"; cold, dreary and sordid outside in
the real world where man and beast worked while others seemed to play.

Groups of canvasmen now began to tear down the animal tent--the
"menagerie," as it has always been known to the man who pays
admission. An hour later, when the big show is over, the spectators
will stream forth, even as their own blue seats begin to clatter to
earth behind them, and they will blink with amazement to find
themselves in the open air, instead of in the menagerie tent. As if by
magic it has disappeared, and with it the sideshow and its banners,
the Punch and Judy show, the horse tent, the cook tent, the blacksmith
shop. Where once stood a dripping white city, now stretches a barren,
ugly waste of unhallowed, unfamiliar ground, flanked by the solitary
temple of tinsel and sawdust which they have just left behind, and
which even now is being desolated by scowling men in overalls. The
crowd oozes forth, to find itself completely lost in the night, all
points of the compass at odds, no man knowing east from west or north
from south in the strange surroundings. The "lot" they have known so
well and crossed so often has been transformed into a trackless
wilderness, through which strange objects rumble and creak, over which
queer, ghastly lights play for the benefit of grumbling men from
another world.

Blake and his companion, standing apart from the lank, wide-eyed
guide, were conversing in low tones.

"We'd better make the circuit of the tents," said Blake, evidently the
leader. "You go to the right and I'll take the other way round. We'll