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As they ran across the field Oswald had a dream-like fancy that perhaps the bull had rooted up the gate with one paralyzing blow, and was now tearing across the field after him and Alice, with the broken gate balanced on its horns. We climbed the stile quickly and looked back; the bull was still on the right side of the gate.

Oswald said, “I think we’ll do without the bull. He did not seem to want to come. We must be kind to dumb animals.”

Alice said, between laughing and crying:

“Oh, Oswald, how can you!” But we did do without the bull, and we did not tell the others how we had hurried to get back. We just said, “The bull didn’t seem to care about coming.”

The others had not been idle. They had got old Clover, the cart-horse, but she would do nothing but graze, so we decided not to use her in the bull-fight, but to let her be the Elephant. The Elephant’s is a nice, quiet part, and she was quite big enough for a young one. Then the black pig could be Learned, and the other two could be something else. They had also got the goat; he was tethered to a young tree.

The donkey was there. Denny was leading him in the halter.

The dogs were there, of course–they always are.

So now we only had to get the turkeys for the applause, and the calves and pigs.

The calves were easy to get, because they were in their own house. There were five. And the pigs were in their houses too. We got them out after long and patient toil, and persuaded them that they wanted to go into the paddock, where the circus was to be. This is done by pretending to drive them the other way. A pig only knows two ways–the way you want him to go and the other. But the turkeys knew thousands of different ways, and tried them all. They made such an awful row we had to drop all ideas of ever hearing applause from their lips, so we came away and left them.

“Never mind,” H. O. said, “they’ll be sorry enough afterwards, nasty, unobliging things, because now they won’t see the circus. I hope the other animals will tell them about it.”

While the turkeys were engaged in baffling the rest of us, Dicky had found three sheep who seemed to wish to join the glad throng, so we let them.

Then we shut the gate of the paddock, and left the dumb circus performers to make friends with each other while we dressed.

Oswald and H. O. were to be clowns. It is quite easy with Albert’s uncle’s pyjamas, and flour on your hair and face, and the red they do the brick-floors with.

Alice had very short pink and white skirts, and roses in her hair and round her dress. Her dress was the pink calico and white muslin stuff off the dressing-table in the girls’ room fastened with pins and tied round the waist with a small bath towel. She was to be the Dauntless Equestrienne, and to give her enhancing act of bare-backed daring, riding either a pig or a sheep, whichever we found was freshest and most skittish. Dora was dressed for the Haute Ecole, which means a riding-habit and a high hat. She took Dick’s topper that he wears with his Etons, and a skirt of Mrs. Pettigrew’s. Daisy dressed the same as Alice, taking the muslin from Mrs. Pettigrew’s dressing-table without saying anything beforehand. None of us would have advised this, and indeed we were thinking of trying to put it back, when Denny and Noel, who were wishing to look like highwaymen, with brown paper top-boots and slouch hats and Turkish towel cloaks, suddenly stopped dressing and gazed out of the window.

“Krikey!” said Dick; “come on, Oswald!” and he bounded like an antelope from the room.