the _Tremont_ could squirt farther, and they had a belief in its quiet
efficiency which was fostered by its reticence in public. It was small
and black, but the _Neptune_ was large, and painted of a gay color lit
up with gilding that sent the blood leaping through a boy's veins. The
boys knew the _Neptune_ was out of order, but they were always expecting
it would come right, and in the mean time they felt that it was an honor
to the town, and they followed it as proudly back to the engine-house
after one of its magnificent failures as if it had been a magnificent
success. The boys were always making magnificent failures themselves,
and they could feel for the _Neptune_.
IV
GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD
THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS
The boys made a very careful study of the circus bills, and when the
circus came they held the performance to a strict account for any
difference between the feats and their representation. For a fortnight
beforehand they worked themselves up for the arrival of the circus into
a fever of fear and hope, for it was always a question with a great many
whether they could get their fathers to give them the money to go in.
The full price was two bits, and the half-price was a bit, or a Spanish
real, then a commoner coin than the American dime in the West; and every
boy, for that time only, wished to be little enough to look young enough
to go in for a bit. Editors of newspapers had a free ticket for every
member of their families; and my boy was sure of going to the circus
from the first rumor of its coming. But he was none the less deeply
thrilled by the coming event, and he was up early on the morning of the
great day, to go out and meet the circus procession beyond the
corporation line.
I do not really know how boys live through the wonder and the glory of
such a sight. Once there were two chariots--one held the band in
red-and-blue uniforms, and was drawn by eighteen piebald horses; and the
other was drawn by a troop of Shetland ponies, and carried in a vast
mythical sea-shell little boys in spangled tights and little girls in
the gauze skirts and wings of fairies. There was not a flaw in this
splendor to the young eyes that gloated on it, and that followed it in
rapture through every turn and winding of its course in the Boy's Town;
nor in the magnificence of the actors and actresses, who came riding two
by two in their circus dresses after the chariots, and looking some
haughty and contemptuous, and others quiet and even bored, as if it were
nothing to be part of such a procession. The boys tried to make them out
by the pictures and names on the bills: which was Rivers, the
bareback-rider, and which was O'Dale, the champion tumbler; which was
the India-rubber man, which the ring-master, which the clown.
Covered with dust, gasping with the fatigue of a three hours' run beside
the procession, but fresh at heart as in the beginning, they arrived
with it on the Commons, where the tent-wagons were already drawn up, and
the ring was made, and mighty men were driving the iron-headed
tent-stakes, and stretching the ropes of the great skeleton of the
pavilion which they were just going to clothe with canvas. The boys were
not allowed to come anywhere near, except three or four who got leave to
fetch water from a neighboring well, and thought themselves richly paid
with half-price tickets. The other boys were proud to pass a word with
them as they went by with their brimming buckets; fellows who had money
to go in would have been glad to carry water just for the glory of
coming close to the circus men. They stood about in twos and threes, and
lay upon the grass in groups debating whether a tan-bark ring was better
than a saw-dust ring; there were different opinions. They came as near
the wagons as they dared, and looked at the circus horses munching hay
from the tail-boards, just like common horses. The wagons were left
standing outside of the tent; but when it was up, the horses were taken
into the dressing-room, and then the boys, with many a backward look at
the wide spread of canvas, and the flags and streamers floating over it
from the centre-pole (the centre-pole was revered almost like a
distinguished personage), ran home to dinner so as to get back good and
early, and be among the first to go in.
All round, before the circus doors were open, the doorkeepers of the
side-shows were inviting people to come in and see the giants and fat
woman and boa-constrictors, and there were stands for peanuts and candy
and lemonade; the vendors cried, "Ice-cold lemonade, from fifteen
hundred miles under ground! Walk up, roll up, tumble up, any way you get
up!" The boys thought this brilliant drolling, but they had no time to
listen after the doors were open, and they had no money to spend on
side-shows or dainties anyway. Inside the tent they found it dark and
cool, and their hearts thumped in their throats with the wild joy of
being there; they recognized one another with amaze, as if they had not
met for years, and the excitement kept growing as other fellows came in.
It was lots of fun, too, watching the country-jakes, as the boys called
the farmer-folk, and seeing how green they looked, and now some of them
tried to act smart with the circus men that came round with oranges to
sell. But the great thing was to see whether fellows that said they were
going to hook in really got in. The boys held it to be a high and
creditable thing to hook into a show of any kind, but hooking into a
circus was something that a fellow ought to be held in special honor for
doing. He ran great risks, and if he escaped the vigilance of the
massive circus man who patrolled the outside of the tent with a cow-hide
and a bulldog, perhaps he merited the fame he was sure to win.
I do not know where boys get some of the notions of morality that govern
them. These notions are like the sports and plays that a boy leaves off
as he gets older to the boys that are younger. He outgrows them, and
other boys grow into them, and then outgrow them as he did. Perhaps they
come down to the boyhood of our time from the boyhood of the race, and
the unwritten laws of conduct may have prevailed among the earliest
Aryans on the plains of Asia that I now find so strange in a retrospect
of the Boy's Town.
The standard of honor there was, in a certain way, very high among the
boys; they would have despised a thief as he deserved, and I cannot
remember one of them who might not have been safely trusted. None of
them would have taken an apple out of a market-wagon, or stolen a melon
from a farmer who came to town with it; but they would all have thought
it fun, if not right, to rob an orchard or hook a watermelon out of a
patch. This would have been a foray into the enemy's country, and the
fruit of the adventure would have been the same as the plunder of a
city, or the capture of a vessel belonging to him on the high seas. In
the same way, if one of the boys had seen a circus man drop a quarter,
he would have hurried to give it back to him, but he would only have
been proud to hook into the circus man's show, and the other fellows
would have been proud of his exploit, too, as something that did honor
to them all. As a person who enclosed bounds and forbade trespass, the
circus man constituted himself the enemy of every boy who respected
himself, and challenged him to practise any sort of strategy. There was
not a boy in the crowd that my boy went with who would have been allowed
to hook into a circus by his parents; yet hooking in was an ideal that
was cherished among them, that was talked of, and that was even
sometimes attempted, though not often. Once, when a fellow really hooked
in, and joined the crowd that had ignobly paid, one of the fellows could
not stand it. He asked him just how and where he got in, and then he
went to the door, and got back his money from the doorkeeper upon the
plea that he did not feel well; and in five or ten minutes he was back
among the boys, a hero of such moral grandeur as would be hard to
describe. Not one of the fellows saw him as he really was--a little
lying, thievish scoundrel. Not even my boy saw him so, though he had on
some other point of personal honesty the most fantastic scruples.
The boys liked to be at the circus early so as to make sure of the grand
entry of the performers into the ring, where they caracoled round on
horseback, and gave a delicious foretaste of the wonders to come. The
fellows were united in this, but upon other matters feeling
varied--some liked tumbling best; some the slack-rope; some
bareback-riding; some the feats of tossing knives and balls and catching
them. There never was more than one ring in those days; and you were not
tempted to break your neck and set your eyes forever askew, by trying to
watch all the things that went on at once in two or three rings.
The boys did not miss the smallest feats of any performance, and they
enjoyed them every one, not equally, but fully. They had their
preferences, of course, as I have hinted; and one of the most popular
acts was that where a horse has been trained to misbehave, so that
nobody can mount him; and after the actors have tried him, the
ring-master turns to the audience, and asks if some gentleman among them
wants to try it. Nobody stirs, till at last a tipsy country-jake is seen
making his way down from one of the top seats toward the ring. He can
hardly walk, he is so drunk, and the clown has to help him across the
ring-board, and even then he trips and rolls over on the saw-dust, and
has to be pulled to his feet. When they bring him up to the horse, he
falls against it; and the little fellows think he will certainly get
killed. But the big boys tell the little fellows to shut up and watch
out. The ring-master and the clown manage to get the country-jake on to
the broad platform on the horse's back, and then the ring-master cracks
his whip, and the two supes who have been holding the horse's head let
go, and the horse begins cantering round the ring. The little fellows
are just sure the country-jake is going to fall off, he reels and
totters so; but the big boys tell them to keep watching out; and pretty
soon the country-jake begins to straighten up. He begins to unbutton his
long gray overcoat, and then he takes it off and throws it into the
ring, where one of the supes catches it. Then he sticks a short pipe
into his mouth, and pulls on an old wool hat, and flourishes a stick
that the supe throws to him, and you see that he is an Irishman just
come across the sea; and then off goes another coat, and he comes out a
British soldier in white duck trousers and red coat. That comes off, and
he is an American sailor, with his hands on his hips, dancing a
horn-pipe. Suddenly away flash wig and beard and false-face, the
pantaloons are stripped off with the same movement, the actor stoops for
the reins lying on the horse's neck, and James Rivers, the greatest
three-horse rider in the world, nimbly capers on the broad pad, and
kisses his hand to the shouting and cheering spectators as he dashes
from the ring past the braying and bellowing brass-band into the
dressing-room!
The big boys have known all along that he was not a real country-jake;
but when the trained mule begins, and shakes everybody off, just like
the horse, and another country-jake gets up, and offers to bet that he
can ride that mule, nobody can tell whether he is a real country-jake or
not. This is always the last thing in the performance, and the boys have
seen with heavy hearts many signs openly betokening the end which they
knew was at hand. The actors have come out of the dressing-room door,
some in their every-day clothes, and some with just overcoats on over
their circus-dresses, and they lounge about near the bandstand watching
the performance in the ring. Some of the people are already getting up
to go out, and stand for this last act, and will not mind the shouts of
"Down in front! Down there!" which the boys eagerly join in, to eke out
their bliss a little longer by keeping away even the appearance of
anything transitory in it. The country-jake comes stumbling awkwardly
into the ring, but he is perfectly sober, and he boldly leaps astride
the mule, which tries all its arts to shake him off, plunging, kicking,
rearing. He sticks on, and everybody cheers him, and the owner of the
mule begins to get mad and to make it do more things to shake the
country-jake off. At last, with one convulsive spring, it flings him
from its back, and dashes into the dressing-room, while the country-jake
picks himself up and vanishes among the crowd.
A man mounted on a platform in the ring is imploring the ladies and
gentlemen to keep their seats, and to buy tickets for the negro-minstrel
entertainment which is to follow, but which is not included in the price
of admission. The boys would like to stay, but they have not the money,
and they go out clamoring over the performance, and trying to decide
which was the best feat. As to which was the best actor, there is never
any question; it is the clown, who showed by the way he turned a double
somersault that he can do anything, and who chooses to be clown simply
because he is too great a creature to enter into rivalry with the other
actors.
There will be another performance in the evening, with real fights
outside between the circus men and the country-jakes, and perhaps some
of the Basin rounders, but the boys do not expect to come; that would be
too much. The boy's brother once stayed away in the afternoon, and went
at night with one of the jour printers; but he was not able to report
that the show was better than it was in the afternoon. He did not get
home till nearly ten o'clock, though, and he saw the sides of the tent
dropped before the people got out; that was a great thing; and what was
greater yet, and reflected a kind of splendor on the boy at second hand,
was that the jour printer and the clown turned out to be old friends.
After the circus, the boy actually saw them standing near the
centre-pole talking together; and the next day the jour showed the
grease that had dripped on his coat from the candles. Otherwise the boy
might have thought it was a dream, that some one he knew had talked on
equal terms with the clown. The boys were always intending to stay up
and see the circus go out of town, and they would have done so, but
their mothers would not let them. This may have been one reason why none
of them ever ran off with a circus.
As soon as a circus had been in town, the boys began to have circuses of
their own, and to practise for them. Everywhere you could see boys
upside down, walking on their hands or standing on them with their legs
dangling over, or stayed against house walls. It was easy to stand on
your head; one boy stood on his head so much that he had to have it
shaved, in the brain-fever that he got from standing on it; but that did
not stop the other fellows. Another boy fell head downward from a rail
where he was skinning-the-cat, and nearly broke his neck, and made it so
sore that it was stiff ever so long. Another boy, who was playing
Samson, almost had his leg torn off by the fellows that were pulling at
it with a hook; and he did have the leg of his pantaloons torn off.
Nothing could stop the boys but time, or some other play coming in; and
circuses lasted a good while. Some of the boys learned to turn
hand-springs; anybody could turn cart-wheels; one fellow, across the
river, could just run along and throw a somersault and light on his
feet; lots of fellows could light on their backs; but if you had a
spring-board, or shavings under a bank, like those by the turning-shop,
you could practise for somersaults pretty safely.
All the time you were practising you were forming your circus company.
The great trouble was not that any boy minded paying five or ten pins to
come in, but that so many fellows wanted to belong there were hardly any
left to form an audience. You could get girls, but even as spectators
girls were a little _too_ despicable; they did not know anything; they
had no sense; if a fellow got hurt they cried. Then another thing was,
where to have the circus. Of course it was simply hopeless to think of a
tent, and a boy's circus was very glad to get a barn. The boy whose
father owned the barn had to get it for the circus without his father
knowing it; and just as likely as not his mother would hear the noise
and come out and break the whole thing up while you were in the very
middle of it. Then there were all sorts of anxieties and perplexities
about the dress. You could do something by turning your roundabout
inside out, and rolling your trousers up as far as they would go; but
what a fellow wanted to make him a real circus-actor was a long pair of
white cotton stockings, and I never knew a fellow that got a pair; I
heard of many a fellow who was said to have got a pair; but when you
came down to the fact, they vanished like ghosts when you try to verify
them. I believe the fellows always expected to get them out of a
bureau-drawer or the clothes-line at home, but failed. In most other
ways, a boy's circus was always a failure, like most other things boys
undertake. They usually broke up under the strain of rivalry; everybody
wanted to be the clown or ring-master; or else the boy they got the barn
of behaved badly, and went into the house crying, and all the fellows
had to run.
[Illustration]
PASSING SHOWS
There were only two kinds of show known by that name in the Boy's Town:
a nigger show, or a performance of burnt-cork minstrels; and an animal
show, or a strolling menagerie; and the boys always meant a menagerie
when they spoke of a show, unless they said just what sort of show. The
only perfect joy on earth in the way of an entertainment, of course, was
a circus, but after the circus the show came unquestionably next. It
made a processional entry into the town almost as impressive as the
circus's, and the boys went out to meet it beyond the corporation line
in the same way. It always had two elephants, at least, and four or five
camels, and sometimes there was a giraffe. These headed the procession,
the elephants in the very front, with their keepers at their heads, and
then the camels led by halters dangling from their sneering lips and
contemptuous noses. After these began to come the show-wagons, with
pictures on their sides, very flattered portraits of the wild beasts and
birds inside; lions first, then tigers (never meaner than Royal Bengal
ones, which the boys understood to be a superior breed), then leopards,
then pumas and panthers; then bears, then jackals and hyenas; then bears
and wolves; then kangaroos, musk-oxen, deer, and such harmless cattle;
and then ostriches, emus, lyre-birds, birds-of-Paradise, and all the
rest.
From time to time the boys ran back from the elephants and camels to get
what good they could out of the scenes in which these hidden wonders
were dramatized in acts of rapine or the chase, but they always came
forward to the elephants and camels again. Even with them they had to
endure a degree of denial, for although you could see most of the
camels' figures, the elephants were so heavily draped that it was a kind
of disappointment to look at them. The boys kept as close as they could,
and came as near getting under the elephants' feet as the keepers would
allow; but, after all, they were driven off a good deal and had to keep
stealing back. They gave the elephants apples and bits of cracker and
cake, and some tried to put tobacco into their trunks, though they knew
very well that it was nearly certain death to do so; for any elephant
that was deceived that way would recognize the boy that did it, and kill
him the next time he came, if it was twenty years afterward. The boys
used to believe that the Miami bridge would break down under the
elephants if they tried to cross it, and they would have liked to see it
do it, but no one ever saw it, perhaps because the elephants always
waded the river. Some boys had seen them wading it, and stopping to
drink and squirt the water out of their trunks. If an elephant got a boy
that had given him tobacco into the river, he would squirt water on him
till he drowned him. Still, some boys always tried to give the
elephants tobacco, just to see how they would act for the time being.
A show was not so much in favor as a circus, because there was so little
performance in the ring. You could go round and look at the animals,
mostly very sleepy in their cages, but you were not allowed to poke them
through the bars, or anything; and when you took your seat there was
nothing much till Herr Driesbach entered the lions' cage, and began to
make them jump over his whip. It was some pleasure to see him put his
head between the jaws of the great African King of Beasts, but the lion
never did anything to him, and so the act wanted a true dramatic climax.
The boys would really rather have seen a bareback-rider, like James
Rivers, turn a back-somersault and light on his horse's crupper, any
time, though they respected Herr Driesbach, too; they did not care much
for a woman who once went into the lions' cage and made them jump round.
The boys had their own beliefs about the different animals, and one of
these concerned the inappeasable ferocity of the zebra. I do not know
why the zebra should have had this repute, for he certainly never did
anything to deserve it; but, for the matter of that, he was like all the
other animals. Bears were not much esteemed, but they would have been if
they could have been really seen hugging anybody to death. It was
always hoped that some of the fiercest animals would get away and have
to be hunted down, and retaken after they had killed a lot of dogs. If
the elephants, some of them, had gone crazy, it would have been
something, for then they would have roamed up and down the turnpike
smashing buggies and wagons, and had to be shot with the six-pound
cannon that was used to celebrate the Fourth of July with.
Another thing that was against the show was that the animals were fed
after it was out, and you could not see the tigers tearing their prey
when the great lumps of beef were thrown them. There was somehow not so
much chance of hooking into a show as a circus, because the seats did
not go all round, and you could be seen under the cages as soon as you
got in under the canvas. I never heard of a boy that hooked into a show;
perhaps nobody ever tried.
But the great reason of all was that you could not have an animal show
of your own as you could a circus. You could not get the animals; and no
boy living could act a camel, or a Royal Bengal tiger, or an elephant so
as to look the least like one.
Of course you could have negro shows, and the boys often had them; but
they were not much fun, and you were always getting the black on your
shirt-sleeves.
THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN
A great new experience which now came to the boy was the theatre, which
he had sometimes heard his father speak of. There had once been a
theatre in the Boy's Town, when a strolling company came up from
Cincinnati, and opened for a season in an empty pork-house. But that was
a long time ago, and, though he had written a tragedy, all that the boy
knew of a theatre was from a picture in a Sunday-school book where a
stage scene was given to show what kind of desperate amusements a person
might come to in middle life if he began by breaking the Sabbath in his
youth. His brother had once been taken to a theatre in Pittsburg by one
of their river-going uncles, and he often told about it; but my boy
formed no conception of the beautiful reality from his accounts of a
burglar who jumped from a roof and was chased by a watchman with a
pistol up and down a street with houses painted on a curtain.
The company which came to the Boy's Town in his time was again from
Cincinnati, and it was under the management of the father and mother of
two actresses, afterward famous, who were then children, just starting
upon their career. These pretty little creatures took the leading parts
in _Bombastes Furioso_ the first night my boy ever saw a play, and he
instantly fell impartially in love with both of them, and tacitly
remained their abject slave for a great while after. When the smaller of
them came out with a large pair of stage boots in one hand and a drawn
sword in the other, and said:
"Whoever dares these boots displace
Shall meet Bombastes face to face,"