The minister paid for the best seats for them to sit in.

All the shopkeepers were there; every man, woman and child in all the town who could find as much as sixpence to pay for standing room was there.

But the strangest circumstance was that before the show began a man went out from the brightly-lit doorway and called in a loud voice to the beggars and little ragged boys and girls who had come to survey the tent on the outside, and he brought them all in and gave them a good part of the tent to sit in, although they had not sixpence to pay, nor even a penny.
Ah! in those days it was a very grand sight.

There were elephants who performed tricks, and camels who walked about with men and bundles on their backs just as they do in eastern deserts, and there were wonderful ladies who dressed and behaved like fairies, and who rode standing tip-toe on the backs of horses and jumped through swinging rings.

But the crowd had not read the circus bills and the newspapers from all the neighbouring cities for nothing.