“I HAVE here,” said the Showman, “the most interesting entertainment to be witnessed on earth! Walk up! walk up, and judge for yourselves!” And with that he beat the drum and blew shrilly on the pipes.

The music travelled to the ears of his audience with a difference: or so it seemed to them, as they stood before the booth. Some heard in it, through the discordant hubbub of the fair, the rattle of vehicles and the tramp of feet in the busy thoroughfares of a great city; for others, it was the whistling of birds in the hedgerows; and to some, like the restless pulsations of the sea. To each, according to his memories and his mood. But the music of the Showman was a single tune for all.

“Walk up! walk up!” bawled the grey-coated Showman, blowing at the pipes and pounding on the drum.

“Darned if I wouldn’t go in, if I had the brass!” quoth a lean, unshaven, shabby-looking man, who stood in front of the booth with his hands in his pockets.

“I’ll stand treat, if you like!” cried a sunken-eyed young woman, whose cheap and much-bedraggled finery matched aptly enough with her wan and haggard countenance. It was the impulse of a moment, but she was the puppet of impulse and danced on the wires at the slightest touch of chance.

“Right you are!” cried the man.

And they mounted the steps together.

“It’s like going up to the altar, isn’t it?” giggled the woman to her companion.

“More like going up to the gallows,” growled the man.

The Showman rattled the coins as he pocketed them, and flinging aside the canvas admitted them to the booth.

The interior was enveloped in a dim obscurity; hardly deep enough to be counted as darkness, but oppressive enough to slow the pulses of both. There was, however, at one end of the booth a large disc projected on the obscurity: a pale, empty, weirdly-lighted circle, which they stared at dumbly, with wonder in their eyes.

“Is this some darned fool’s joke?” growled the man.

“Hush!” said the woman, “the entertainment has commenced.”

And, true enough, the disc at which they had been staring had already a stirring, as of life, across its surface.

They were aware of a couple of enthralling faces fronting them side by side on the disc.

One was a woman’s face, exquisitely beautiful, with soft blue eyes, full of the most charming gaiety, and with lips as sweetly winsome as a child’s: the other was a man’s face, proud and handsome, the mouth set firmly, the eyes full of thought.

“Such a face I had dreamed of as my own,” sighed the woman.

“So I had imagined I might have been,” mused the man.

And then the scenes on the disc began to wax and dwindle rapidly; like the momentary clinging, and as rapid vanishing, of breath across a mirror of polished steel.

There was a vague fluttering and interchange of images; an elusive, intangible influx of suggestions, and an equally dreamy efflux of the same.

A young girl growing into beautiful womanhood, well-dressed, shapely, sought eagerly in marriage, admired by the opposite sex, and envied by her own. Then a woman in the prime of her powers of enjoyment with her charms undiminished and her wishes ripened wedded, and successfully shaping her life: a woman blessed greatly, and very happy.

And side by side with these dream-fancies, or imaginings, went those of a young man facing the world gallantly; surmounting every obstacle easily, and conquering hearts as if by a spell. There was success for him in every scene on which he entered: he was proud and admired, and very haughty, and very rich.

Presently, as if through some dexterous sleight of hand, the pictures of his wooing blended waveringly and dimly with the pictures which emerged for the bedraggled woman who stood beside the loafer in front of the disc.

In the church, when the wedding-march was being played, and in the vignettes of domestic happiness that ensued, the faces and scenes mysteriously coalesced.

For the two spectators, who watched the shifting pictures breathlessly, there were no longer four figures in the scene, but only two.

“Some such future I had imagined for myself,” the man muttered.

And the woman mused amazedly: “These were day-dreams of my own.”

The disc became obscured, as if their eyes were blurred mistily.

The woman gulped down something: and the man clenched his teeth.

There was a sudden exquisite clarity in the pictures. They were looking at a cluster of white-washed cottages, with tall thatched roofs and with great stone chimneys: a lonely little hamlet drowsing in the sun. White-winged ducks were quacking in the roadway, a grey-coated donkey was grazing beside a hedge, and the threadlets of smoke, that mounted lazily above the roofs, rose up into a sky of the most exquisite purity, spacious, high, and cloudlessly blue. And again there was only one scene for them both.

“My God, that is where I was born!” groaned the man.

“That’s my mother’s cottage!” sobbed the woman, and wept aloud.

Then came rural scenes of almost every character, with a lad and a girl moving flittingly through them laughing and kissing in the lanes among the brambles, drifting together everywhere, sweethearting through it all.

“Are you Nelly King, then?” asked the man, hoarsely.

“And you . . . you are Stephen Laity, are you not?”

“If we could both die here and now!” cried the man.

Then the pictures for a while grew blurred and confused, till presently they shewed the gas-lighted streets of London. . . .

“My God, I will see no more!” cried the girl. And she shudderingly held her hand before her eyes.

“Nor I, either!” cried the man, with an oath.

“However much you close your eyes,” said the Showman, “you will cancel nothing of the pictures on the screen.”

But they had turned and fled even while he was speaking.

“Even in the fair the pictures will pursue you!” said the stern-visaged Showman, following them with his eyes.