CIRCUS DAYS 15 
we bought the Walter L. Main show, which con- 
sisted of nothing more than a tent and some seats. 
We had no animals but we hired performers and 
started out on the road. 
For. one week we had luck and took in money; 
then came nine days of rain. The tent absorbed 
tons of water, and we had no way of drying it and 
preventing mildew. It was so heavy that the can- 
vas-man could scarcely handle it. 
At Springfield I went out to the lot and found 
Fitzgerald there; he just stood there, looking at the 
wet canvas spread out on the ground with the rain 
beating down on it. The canvas-men had given up 
—the tent was too heavy to hoist. That was the end 
of my only adventure as a circus-owner. 
The big shows carried an extra tent to meet 
emergencies, but we couldn’t have one, of course. 
The rain had beaten us to a finish. Even if we 
could have raised our tent, we should have had 
no audience, and we weren’t well enough supplied 
with money to follow Bailey’s idea of giving a 
performance if there were only two persons there to 
see it. Our “Greatest Show in the World” was sunk 
in an Illinois mud-puddle. 
In later years I have stood sponsor for many of 
the shows and small circuses that visited Singapore. 
One I well remember belonged to an old friend, 
‘A. Bert Wilison of Sydney, Australia, who had 
been with the advance at the time I was with R. W. 
Fryer’s Circus. He came with his show from Cal. 
