Before I called I saw the Nelson family do their turn. The turn, in fact, was what made me call. I might as well admit that I am partial to acrobatic, turns. Most men of a sedentary habit are partial to them. As for me, I never breathe quite so hard as when, after a bunch of his relations have come down from their perches on his arms, shoulders and head, the heavy an wipes his sweated brow and plays a bellows with his chest.

I got most of my exercise this way - by the process of suggestion, as the hypnotists say. it is exciting, versatile, anything except fatiguing.

The Nelsons have reached the line that separates the human from the mechanical. A touch more of perfection and you would believe that they are wired and run by machinery.

"How in the name of endurance do they keep that thing up for half an hour?" I asked my neighbor at the Orpheum. He couldn't even guess.

But Grandpa Nelson told me all about it when I called.

"There ain't no thirty minutes in the first place," he said; "there's only eight minutes. The speed of the act is what fools you, unless you hold a watch on it. And even the eight minutes is worked out in shifts: while one group is working another is always getting its breath. The act don't take up much time on the stage, but it's taken me three generations of my own blood to build it."

My call was directed to the Langham Hotel. The address seemed a bit incongruous. For me there had always been something eerie about bounding, soaring acrobats. I thought vaguely that they had their habitations in trees, or perhaps up among the rafters over the stage gridiron. Positively it would not have surprised me to find them hanging by their toes from the hotel gas fixtures.

But Grandpa Nelson's son Arthur, who met me in the hotel lobby, brought me down to civilization with a band. To go up one flight and see whether the thirteen other Nelsons were all there, he used the elevator. I could have done that myself.

They were all there: Grandpa, sons and daughters, sons' wives, and their sons and daughters. The ages ran from Grandpa's sixty down to Hilda's twelve months; and the chairs and a trunk didn't half go round. A good many Nelsons stood - possibly the gas fixtures were frail and the children had what was left of the floor.

In this propinquity I rapidly became one of the family, and in five minutes I could talk double frops and falling columns and rolls up and down and Rizley acts with the best of them. I found that my knee was just made for a pretty girl to sit on while she counted my buttons to find me rich man or poor man or beggarman or thief. But Rosina didn't say thief, she said Injun chief instead; and she was just three.

Rosina is the littlest one of the family that appears on the stage. We spoke different dialects. She said "ittle" for little and her "you" was exactly like the brace of "o's" that are sounded in moon. But we got along beautifully.

She showed me how on scratches the back of one's neck with one's slipper, and I showed her how one whistles through a mouthful of fingers.

You had only to place a hand on her and she rose to your laps - the garments of man give him two - or to your shoulders as easily and lightly as a penny balloon.

Rosina explained to me that this lightness was part of her profession and called the life; and she was very pretty with her bright blue eyes dancing in a dimpled pink under a fuzzy crown of golden hair.

Rosina trusted me, but her sister Tina did not. Tinnie, as Rosina called her, is the little black-haired, black-eyed beauty of seven who does the dangerous topmost poses in Grandpa Nelson's "living" genealogical tree, not to mention her unbroken chain of back flops across the stage and her vivid personation of the indestructible rubber ball.

I think Tiny mistook me for a member of a society that makes a specialty of restraining little girls of seven from doing what she does on the stage. Tiny scorned my knee and didn't care how many buttons I wore.

Grandpa Nelson had told me all about the big sensation for the new week, in which Tiny was to be sky emember in a column four high, one on the shoulders of the other, and all as rigid as a rod, while the column fell face-downward to the stage, to be broken into four rolling somersaults, only at just the right fraction of the second, because a premature relaxation on the part of any quarter of the column would do heaven only knows what to the Nelson family.

"I asked Tiny how she liked the prospect.

"Oh, it's lovely," she said; "really it is. and I'm not in the slightest danger, and I wouldn't miss doing it for anything in the world."

"But tell me," I said, "isn't this the hardest thing you do?"

"Nothing I do is the hardest. They're all easy and just as safe as standing here."

"But which of all of them was the hardest to learn?"

"Why, none of them at all; they came natural like. Anybody could do little -" Her Uncle Arthur broke in with laugh, and a wink went with it, as much as to say "she knows her business."

"The hardest things she does are those flops across the stage," he said; "they take more wind than a mile race. The column of four is easy for her, because she has only her own weight to hold and balance. It's just as easy for her as sliding off a chair; the real balancing and strength are three stories below her."

"The kids ain't so modest as they sound," chuckled Robert Jr., their proud popper; "it tickles them most to death when they make a hit and get called out to repeat their little bow."

"How do you reward them when they do particularly well?" I inquired thinking of the trained bears of the week before, who got a bit of biscuit every time they distinguished themselves.

Grandpa Nelson answered: "Reward them! We don't reward them; the public does that. The youngsters know when they do well and when they don't, and there's nothing sweeter to them than the sound of the applause out in front. The younger they are the sweeter it sounds."

I noticed for the first time that Grandpa Nelson wore a necktie. The most I had seen of him before this was a ring whose diamond was smaller than a lemon, but no bigger than a grocery store lime.

In ordinary circumstances this necktie should not have been a matter for publication. It was a little white lawn bow arranged carelessly so as not to conceal the Koh-i-noor that bulged from Grandpa Nelson's collar button.

It was conspicuous because neither the grown sons nor the almost grown grandsons wore neckties. I had asked them why and they had explained that it was a circus habit. A diamond collar button and a diamond shirt stud, they told me, were the first external tokens of a circus performer's success; hence the absence of any neckwear that might conceal either.

So I sat there, astonished out of all my good manners, staring the starch out of Grandpa Nelson's "doctor's diploma," as we used to call the white bow when it was worn with afternoon clothes by the medical profession.

He may have thought that I was interested in a great cross of gold studded with diamonds that he wore chained to his shirt, in place of the simple solitaire studs affected by his progeny; for he smiled amiably, as if inviting interrogation. Lured by the smile, I asked him how he cam to be found in a necktie.

My friend Colonel Irish could not have been more embarrassed had I caught him in a similar fix. Grandpa Nelson felt for the tie in a shameful pretense of not knowing it was there. Then he glanced at the artist working on the sketches and finally he looked back at me, reproachfully.

"I sometimes wear a necktie - in winter," he said.

I said to the artist: "Be sure Mr. Nelson Sr. gets a necktie in that picture"; whereat the family and their founder smiled, and again I was one of them - one of them to all save Tiny, whose dark eyes still held me in suspicion and disdain. Tiny could see S.P. C.C. written all over me.

And here it was that Grandpa Nelson told me how their brief act was made out to be so long, and how the generations of Nelsons had been trained from infancy to perfect it.

Pressing my arm between his thumb and the diamond, he said: "I might have made an acrobat of you if I'd commenced with you some thirty years ago."

I looked yearningly at the big diamond, but he said it was too late now.

"You've got to train them when the bones are pliable and the muscles soft," he said. "I could make an ordinary acrobat out of you, gut you would be spotted as a dub by any expert.

Your legs wouldn't hang handsome-like when you were on your head, and your back would have no give.

You might learn a horizontal bar act, or a little trapeze show-off, or a slackwire turn, but you'd never be a real acrobat."

It was discouraging, but I tried to take it like a man.

"The real acrobat," he went on, "is like the real fiddler - he's made while he's young and limber. That's why I use the kids. I teach them just as I was taught when I was a kid."

"Do they take to it kindly at the first?" I ventured, remembering the literature of my Sunday School days, in which the bad little boys that stole under the canvas invariably were kidnapped by the fiendish ringmaster, who taught them their ungodly trade with a blacksnake or a red-hot iron or a tent pole or any weapon that was handy.

"I'll give you a fair answer to that question without any hocus pocus," said Grandpa Nelson.

"Here, Arthur, get the pillows and give the kids a posture."

Arthur brought two pillows from the adjoining bedroom to the center of the carpet and flung himself on them, back down, legs up, in the posture of the Rizley act.

Anita, twenty-two months old, toddled for the legs.

Hilda, twelve months, croaked and squirmed in her mother's arms.

Hilda got there first. Her mother tossed her gently into the posture and in a flash she was whizzing and whirring in the air from the tips of Uncle Arthur's hands and feet until all that was left of here was a revolving smile and a score of whirling baby legs.

"I guess maybe the kids don't like it," laughed their granddad, when Anita got her turn and Hilda solemnly crawled over to the artist and offered him the rear elevation of a head stand.

"Wait till Arthur puts the pillows back and see what they do."

Arthur flung the pillows to the bed, and in a flash the babies were after them.

Anita dragged hers over the floor easily enough, bar a couple of tumbles; but Hilda had three times her size and more than here weight to pull, and came back an inch at a time with a frown that reminded me of Tinn