Only two days before, he had walked among the same tents,
staring at horses and gay trappings and painted Amazons
as one who noted nothing; yet the agony of the thing he now
saw at last lit up all the rest as with a lightning flash,
and burned the scene forever on his brain and heart.
It was at Wareham, too,--Wareham, where she had promised
to be his wife, where she had married him only a year before.
How well he remembered the night! They left the parsonage;
they had ten miles to drive in the moonlight before reaching
their stopping-place,--ten miles of such joy as only a man could know,
he thought, who had had the warm fruit of life hanging within
full vision, but just out of reach,--just above his longing lips;
and then, in an unlooked-for, gracious moment, his!
He could swear she had loved him that night, if never again.

But this picture passed away, and he saw that maddening circle
with the caracoling steeds. He head the discordant music, the monotonous
creak of the machinery, the strident laughter of the excited riders.
As first the thing was a blur, a kaleidoscope of whirling colors,
into which there presently crept form and order.
. . . A boy who had cried to get on, and was now crying to get off.
. . . Old Rube Hobson and his young wife; Rube looking white
and scared, partly by the whizzing motion, and partly by the
prospect of paying out ten cents for the doubtful pleasure.
. . . Pretty Hetty Dunnell with that young fellow from Portland;
she too timid to mount one of the mettle-some chargers, and snuggling
close to him in one of the circling seats. The, good Got!--
Dell! sitting on a prancing white horse, with the man he knew,
the man he feared, riding beside her; a man who kept holding on her
hat with fingers that trembled,--the very hat she "'peared bride in"