Inside the school, also, an excited, expectant throng waited. Special permission had been given to the whole student body to view the parade and every one of the many windows facing on Terrace Avenue was filled with faces. Teachers (who are universally referred to as old by their pupils) were young again in those slow, expectant, listening moments. “Old” Cartright, “Old” Johnson, “Grouchy” Gerry, “Keep-in” Keeler were all there, with their clustering, elbowing charges about them, waiting to see the parade.

The large windows of the gymnasium were packed. So were the windows of the big assembly room. “Old” Granger, the music teacher, seemed almost human for once, as he actually elbowed his way to a front place where Doctor Sharpe smilingly awaited the coming of the great show.

The weather was too brisk for open windows, but the several hundred waiters heard the muffled strains of music, three blocks, two blocks, one block off, and in the renewed excitement and suspense many noses grew flat in an instant, pressed eagerly against the glass.

One block away. Half a block away. The great bass drum sounded like thunder. They could hear the complaining roar of a monarch lion. The frightful but rousing din of the calliope (eternal voice of the circus) smote their ears. Louder, louder, louder sounded the music. In a minute, half a minute, the motley heralds of the fantastic, gorgeous, roaring spectacle would show themselves.

Then the music seemed a trifle less stentorian and, presently becoming more and more subdued, was muffled again by distance. The lion was either losing his pep or retreating. His roar seemed less tremendous—at last he seemed to speak in a kind of aggrieved whisper.

Even the terrible calliope modified its shrieking and discordant tones. It seemed to be receding. Could the Evening Bungle have committed the greatest bungle of all its bungling career and misstated the line of march? Impossible, perish the thought! Where but down the fine, broad thoroughfare of Terrace Avenue would a circus parade make its ostentatious way? The pupils waited, patient, confident, all suspense. The procession had paused....

They waited five, ten, fifteen minutes, till the calliope had ceased entirely to shock the air with its outlandish clamor and the lion had ceased to roar.

Twenty minutes.

Then, suddenly, a procession appeared indeed before this thronging grandstand of the school. It consisted of two people, little Irene Flynn and Scout Pee-wee Harris. But it was not without music, for he was demonstrating the powers of his official whistle for her especial edification, his cheeks bulging with his official effort.

Straight along the thoroughfare they came, the eyes of the waiting multitude upon them. They ascended the steps of the large central entrance, then disappeared to view and presently reappeared in the main corridor and entered the adjacent office of the principal, which awful sanctum had been invaded by a score of pupils and teachers who still crowded at the windows.

“I had to stay as late as this on account of making the parade turn into Allerton Street,” said the small official, “because I made a truck driver stop on account of his being—maybe—he was going to run over Irene Flynn, but, anyway, I made him stop and his load went over—gee whiz, awful funny—all over—and so then I made the parade turn into Allerton Street and we stayed to watch it and, oh, boy, it was peachy. There were wild animals and chariots with men in kind of white nightgowns in ’em and clowns and elephants and zebras and fat women and skinny men and dwarfs and a kind of a man only not exactly a man that they held by a chain and he was wild and uncivilized like—you know—like scouts, and he growled and looked like a monkey, and, gee whiz, they had two giraffes and a lady with a beard like Smith Brothers’ cough drops, and I sat on Mrs. Ashley’s porch and a boy that sits in a window because he’s sick saw the parade, so that shows how I did a good turn, even Mrs. Ashley said so, and they had snakes in a glass wagon—gee whiz, you ought to have seen all the things they had! Wasn’t it dandy, Irene?”

“You saw the procession?” said “Grouchy” Gerry.

“Oh, boy, did we! Geee whiz, you ought to have seen it. We saw it all from beginning to end, didn’t we, Irene? And, anyway, she has to be excused on account of a parade being something special. Oh, boy, if you had seen it, you’d have said it was something special——”

He paused for breath and in the interval a boy student sank into affected unconsciousness across a table. Another staggered to the wall, leaning limp and helpless against it. A girl buried her head on another girl’s shoulder, silently shaking. Principal Sharpe managed to reach his revolving chair, swung around in it away from the scene of anguish, leaned forward, placed his two hands before his face, and said nothing. Miss Rossiter, proud teacher of our hero’s own class, gave one look at him, an inscrutable look, then glanced at another teacher, turned around and laid her face gently on the top of the Encyclopedia Britannica case in a kind of last abandonment of laughing despair.

“He—he—boasts—he——” she tried to speak but could not. “He c-cl-aims that his sp-ec—specialty is—f-f-fixing—fix—fixing. Oh, dear, I have —a—a—headache!”

“So didn’t I fix it all right?” demanded Pee-wee proudly. “Gee whiz, you can leave it to me to handle traffic out there, because I’m not scared of them. Oh, boy! You should have seen those elephants!”

That afternoon, in composition hour, the pupils did not (as has been planned) write upon the theme of “What impressed me most in the procession.” One waggish boy did, indeed, place that heading at the top of his composition sheet and wrote nothing whatever underneath it, which seemed a truthful enough composition when you come to think of it. But he was kept in after school for essaying the rÔle of humorist.