A romantic tale of the big top — in the time of the great circus trains that delivered a wild magic to the American heartland.

The year is 1935 and Jasper Grady, twelve years-old, in Wichita, Kansas flees an abusive home and casts his lot with The Greenbaugh Majestic Circus, The Miracle Colossus, where he will meet . . .

Bap, the genius clown and keeper of dark secrets . . .

Beth and Anne Kelly, twin trapeze artists who look like fairytale princesses and seem to share a single, troubled soul . . .

Roy Renaldo, the matinee-idol knife-thrower and lethal lover . . .

Carl Ellenbeck, the lion tamer, who is terrified his big cats will discover how terrified he is of them . . .

Colonel Adam S. Greenbaugh, owner of the circus, who watches as his way of life slips slowly into the realm of forgotten dreams . . .

But in this novella the dream lives on, in all its sordid, beautiful, breathtaking, heartbreaking glory.

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The circus is the only ageless delight that you can buy for money. Everything else is supposed to be bad for you. But the circus is good for you. It is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a truly happy dream. The big cats do things no cat would ever do. You can see them jumping effortlessly over Mr. Konyot’s head instead of making that unbelievable low rush they close with in the dusk when the female lion shows her cubs the way to kill.

The circus bulls are disciplined and can make you feel that they are gay. They do not spread their ears and raise their trunks and come crashing through the bush.

The bears ride bicycles and dance and they would all get drunk if the Klausser family let them. You have known grizzlies to do very different things. But it was always because men intruded on their natural lives.

But in the circus it is like a dream. The animals are dream animals. The riders are dream riders. The flyers really fly and catch each other the way you are caught in good dreams.

The horses make the loveliest pattern of dreams and the best are the free horses. You get from the clowns just what you bring to them. As well as that which shows, they bring a great baggage of old mockeries and deflations that are as old as our conceits and self-delusions.

They also bring the true comic that makes the dreams we wake from laughing.

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