Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 186, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1918 — CIRCUS WILL BE HERE TOMORROW [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

CIRCUS WILL BE HERE TOMORROW

Let joy be unconfined! The Sparks circus will reach here tomorrow in its march about the country, and its proprietors bid patrons come’ to its monumental entertainment with expectations keyed to the highest possible point. Even then, they are sure, the most vivid imagination will be startled and the most sanguine hope outdone. The big amusement institution comes eager to prove once more that it is one of the greatest of its kind, country and era. It comes with the proud realization that all this season its throngs of patrons, limited in number only to its seating capacity—that itself bigger than ever before in its historyhave invariably united in one grand, swelling chorus of vociferous praise and rapt wonder. Soon after tomorrows daybreak it is expected, the long railroad trains which are required to transport the circus will have reached this city. All arrangements have been completed for their undelayed progress into the railroad yards arid for the speedy emptying of the flat, stock and sleeping cars. The boss 'canvasman and his horde of brawny followers will reach the show grounds first and immediately the work of creating the canvas city of a day will begin. The street parade is scheduled to leave the show grounds at ten o’clock in the morning. There is promised a stunningly grand and glorious pageantric prelude to the performance on the show grounds. In bewildering array will be viewed gorgeous military legions; massive, splendidly ornate chariots, floats, vans and tableau wagons; celebrated bands and novel musical equipages; hordes of the world’s most famous clowns and jesters; fierce wild beasts m open dens with their daring trainers; droves of richly decked elephants and camels; wardrobes and trappings that represent a fortune. When the circus opens its gates at one o’clock in the afternoon to receive the human parade of patrons, the crows who stop to comment and observe in the menagerie tent will find dens of rare and curious beasts

ranged in a great ellipse. • It’s just as impossible to crowd the circus performance into a single story as it is to sit in any of the five thousand odd seats that look down upon the big arena and take in every, feature of the spectacle. The spectator who could watch a ‘ rings at once, see every .feat of skil and daring and dexterity that is simultaneously enacted by gaily dressed troupes of shapely performers, watch the intermediate acts going on the stages between the rings and not miss a single one of the antics among the companies o, clowns capering about on the sawdust as a frolicsome border to the variegated, living mosaic of entertainment in the center of the amphitheatre, would deserve to be crownet the King of Freaks and placed on a pinnacle in the Congress of Curiosities in the side show. There are troupes of elephants that can do. anything from trotting around with each other’s tails ii their trunks to playing a game of base ball and dancing the tango ; soloists, duos, trios, quartettes and companies of “human birds,” acrobats who seem more at home on flying rings and lofty hcahontal bars than on terra firana; equestrians and equestriennes who would make the centaurs themselves look like noviees by the their feats of horsemanship; contortionists who can tie themselves into knots easier than a saleslady can wrap up a package, in a department store; equilibrists who don’t care any more about the laws of gravitation than a taxi chauffeur does about the speed limit; backfiring mules,' boxing kangaroos, horses that can turkey trot as gracefully as any cabaret performer on the circuit; milk white steeds and doys that pose like artists’s models. Sandowp of both sexes, performing ponies, slack-wire dancers that would make Blondin ashamed of himself, who can do a one-step on a slender cable ten feet above the ground as nonchalantly as if it were a ballroom floor, and an army of trapeze performers who are the most . accomplished ever assembled.