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 everyday clothes, and some with just overcoats on over
their circus-dresses, and they lounge about near the band-stand 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 downwards 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 follow 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.
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 afterwards. 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 bare-back 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.
If you had the courage you could go up the ladder into the curtained
tower on the elephant's back, and ride round the ring with some of the
other fellows; but my boy at least never had the courage; and he never
was of those who mounted the trick pony and were shaken off as soon as
they got on. It seemed to be a good deal of fun, but he did not dare to
risk it; and he had an obscure trouble of mind when, the last thing,
four or five ponies were brought out with as many monkeys tied on their
backs, and set to run a race round the ring. The monkeys always looked
very miserable, and even the one who won the race, and rode round
afterwards with an American flag in his hand and his cap very much
cocked over his left eye, did not seem to cheer up any.
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.
A show had the same kind of smell as a circus, up to a certain point,
and then its smell began to be different. Both smelt of tan-bark or
saw-dust and trodden grass, and both smelt of lemonade and cigars; but
after that a show had its own smell of animals. I have found in later
life that this is a very offensive smell on a hot day; but I do not
believe a boy ever thinks so; for him it is just a different smell from
a circus smell. There were two other reasons why a show was not as much
fun as a circus, and one was that it was thought instructive, and
fellows went who were not allowed to go to circuses. 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.
[Illustration: THE CIRCUS.]
X.
HIGHDAYS AND HOLIDAYS.
[Illustration: "THE BOYS BEGAN TO CELEBRATE IT WITH GUNS AND PISTOLS."]
THE greatest day of all in the Boy's Town was Christmas. In that part of
the West the boys had never even heard of Thanksgiving, and their elders
knew of it only as a festival of far-off New England. Christmas was the
day that was kept in all churches and families, whether they were
Methodists or Episcopalians, Baptists or Universalists, Catholics or
Protestants; and among boys of whatever persuasion it was kept in a
fashion that I suppose may have survived from the early pioneer times,
when the means of expressing joy were few and primitive. On Christmas
eve, before the church-bells began to ring in the day, the boys began to
celebrate it with guns and pistols, with shooting-crackers and
torpedoes; and they never stopped as long as their ammunition lasted. A
fellow hardly ever had more than a bit to spend, and after he had paid
ten cents for a pack of crackers, he had only two cents and a half for
powder; and if he wanted his pleasure to last, he had to be careful. Of
course he wanted his pleasure to last, but he would rather have had no
pleasure at all than be careful, and most of the boys woke Christmas
morning empty-handed, unless they had burst their pistols the night
before; then they had a little powder left, and could go pretty well
into the forenoon if they could find some other boy who had shot off his
powder but had a whole pistol left. Lots of fellows' pistols got out
of order without bursting, and that saved powder; but generally a fellow
kept putting in bigger and bigger loads till his pistol blew to pieces.
There were all sorts of pistols; but the commonest was one that the boys
called a Christmas-crack; it was of brass, and when it burst the barrel
curled up like a dandelion stem when you split it and put it in water. A
Christmas-crack in that shape was a trophy; but of course the little
boys did not have pistols; they had to put up with shooting-crackers, or
maybe just torpedoes. Even then the big boys would get to fire them off
on one pretext or another. Some fellows would hold a cracker in their
hands till it exploded; nearly everybody had burned thumbs, and some of
the boys had their faces blackened with powder. Now and then a fellow
who was nearly grown up would set off a whole pack of crackers in a
barrel; it seemed almost incredible to the little boys.
It was glorious, and I do not think any of the boys felt that there was
anything out of keeping in their way of celebrating the day, for I do
not think they knew why they were celebrating it, or, if they knew, they
never thought. It was simply a holiday, and was to be treated like a
holiday. After all, perhaps there are just as strange things done by
grown people in honor of the loving and lowly Saviour of Men; but we
will not enter upon that question. When they had burst their pistols or
fired off their crackers, the boys sometimes huddled into the back part
of the Catholic church and watched the service, awed by the dim altar
lights, the rising smoke of incense, and the grimness of the sacristan,
an old German, who stood near to keep order among them. They knew the
fellows who were helping the priest; one of them was the boy who stood
on his head till he had to have it shaved; they would have liked to mock
him then and there for wearing a petticoat, and most of them had the
bitterest scorn and hate for Catholics in their hearts; but they were
afraid of the sacristan, and they behaved very well as long as they were
in the church; but as soon as they got out they whooped and yelled, and
stoned the sacristan when he ran after them.
My boy would have liked to do all that too, just to be with the crowd,
but at home he had been taught to believe that Catholics were as good as
anybody, and that you must respect everybody's religion. His father and
the priest were friendly acquaintances, and in a dim way he knew that
his father had sometimes taken the Catholics' part in his paper when the
prejudice against foreigners ran high. He liked to go to the Catholic
church, though he was afraid of the painted figure that hung full length
on the wooden crucifix, with the blood-drops under the thorns on its
forehead, and the red wound in its side. He was afraid of it as
something both dead and alive; he could not keep his eyes away from the
awful, beautiful, suffering face, and the body that seemed to twist in
agony, and the hands and feet so cruelly nailed to the cross.
But he never connected the thought of that anguish with Christmas. His
head was too full of St. Nicholas, who came down the chimney, and filled
your stockings; the day belonged to St. Nicholas. The first thing when
you woke you tried to catch everybody, and you caught a person if you
said "Christmas Gift!" before he or she did; and then the person you
caught had to give you a present. Nobody ever said "Merry Christmas!"
as people do now; and I do not know where the custom of saying
"Christmas Gift" came from. It seems more sordid and greedy than it
really was; the pleasure was to see who could say it first; and the boys
did not care for what they got if they beat, any more than they cared
for what they won in fighting eggs at Easter.
At New-Year's the great thing was to sit up and watch the old year out;
but the little boys could not have kept awake even if their mothers had
let them. In some families, perhaps of Dutch origin, the day was kept
instead of Christmas, but for most of the fellows it was a dull time.
You had spent all your money at Christmas, and very likely burst your
pistol, anyway. It was some consolation to be out of school, which did
not keep on New-Year's; and if it was cold you could have fires on the
ice; or, anyway, you could have fires on the river-bank, or down by the
shore, where there was always plenty of drift-wood.
But New-Year's could not begin to compare with Easter. All the boys'
mothers colored eggs for them at Easter; I do not believe there was a
mother in the Boy's Town mean enough not to. By Easter Day, in that
Southern region, the new grass was well started, and grass gave a
beautiful yellow color to the eggs boiled with it. Onions colored them a
soft, pale green, and logwood, black; but the most esteemed egg of all
was a calico-egg. You got a piece of new calico from your mother, or
maybe some of your aunts, and you got somebody (most likely your
grandmother, if she was on a visit at the time) to sew an egg up in it;
and when the egg was boiled it came out all over the pattern of the
calico. My boy's brother once had a calico-egg that seemed to my boy a
more beautiful piece of color than any Titian he has seen since; it was
kept in a bureau-drawer till nobody could stand the smell. But most
Easter eggs never outlasted Easter Day. As soon as the fellows were done
breakfast they ran out of the house and began to fight eggs with the
other fellows. They struck the little ends of the eggs together, and if
your egg broke another fellow's egg, then you had a right to it.
Sometimes an egg was so hard that it would break every other egg in the
street; and generally when a little fellow lost his egg, he began to cry
and went into the house. This did not prove him a cry-baby; it was
allowable, like crying when you stumped your toe. I think this custom of
fighting eggs came from the Pennsylvania Germans, to whom the Boy's Town
probably owed its Protestant observance of Easter. There was nothing
religious in the way the boys kept it, any more than there was in their
way of keeping Christmas.
I do not think they distinguished between it and All-Fool's Day in
character or dignity. About the best thing you could do then was to
write April Fool on a piece of paper and pin it to a fellow's back, or
maybe a girl's, if she was a big girl, and stuck-up, or anything. I do
not suppose there is a boy now living who is silly enough to play this
trick on anybody, or mean enough to fill an old hat with rocks and
brickbats, and dare a fellow to kick it; but in the Boy's Town there
were some boys who did this; and then the fellow had to kick the hat, or
else come under the shame of having taken a dare. Most of the
April-foolings were harmless enough, like saying, "Oh, see that flock of
wild-geese flying over!" and "What have you got on the back of your
coat!" and holloing "April Fool!" as soon as the person did it.
Sometimes a crowd of boys got a bit with a hole in it, and tied a string
in it, and laid it on the sidewalk, and then hid in a cellar, and when
anybody stooped to pick it up, they pulled it in. That was the greatest
fun, especially if the person was stingy; but the difficulty was to get
the bit, whether it had a hole in it or not.
From the first of April till the first of May was a long stretch of
days, and you never heard any one talk about a May Party till April Fool
was over. Then there always began to be talk of a May Party, and who was
going to be invited. It was the big girls that always intended to have
it, and it was understood at once who was going to be the Queen. At
least the boys had no question, for there was one girl in every school
whom all the boys felt to be the most beautiful; but probably there was
a good deal of rivalry and heart-burning among the girls themselves.
Very likely it was this that kept a May Party from hardly ever coming to
anything but the talk. Besides the Queen, there were certain little
girls who were to be Lambs; I think there were Maids of Honor, too; but
I am not sure. The Lambs had to keep very close to the Queen's person,
and to wait upon her; and there were boys who had to hold the tassels of
the banners which the big boys carried. These boys had to wear white
pantaloons, and shoes and stockings, and very likely gloves, and to
suffer the jeers of the other fellows who were not in the procession.
The May Party was a girl's affair altogether, though the boys were
expected to help; and so there were distinctions made that the boys
never dreamed of in their rude republic, where one fellow was as good as
another, and the lowest-down boy in town could make himself master if
he was bold and strong enough. The boys did not understand those
distinctions, and nothing of them remained in their minds after the
moment; but the girls understood them, and probably they were taught at
home to feel the difference between themselves and other girls, and to
believe themselves of finer clay. At any rate, the May Party was apt to
be poisoned at its source by questions of class; and I think it might
have been in the talk about precedence, and who should be what, that my
boy first heard that such and such a girl's father was a mechanic, and
that it was somehow dishonorable to be a mechanic. He did not know why,
and he has never since known why, but the girls then knew why, and the
women seem to know now. He was asked to be one of the boys who held the
banner-tassels, and he felt this a great compliment somehow, though he
was so young that he had afterwards only the vaguest remembrance of
marching in the procession, and going to a raw and chilly grove
somewhere, and having untimely lemonade and cake. Yet these might have
been the associations of some wholly different occasion.
No aristocratic reserves marred the glory of Fourth of July. My boy was
quite a well-grown boy before he noticed that there were ever any clouds
in the sky except when it was going to rain. At all other times,
especially in summer, it seemed to him that the sky was perfectly blue,
from horizon to horizon; and it certainly was so on the Fourth of July.
He usually got up pretty early, and began firing off torpedoes and
shooting-crackers, just as at Christmas. Everybody in town had been
wakened by the salutes fired from the six-pounder on the river-bank, and
by the noise of guns and pistols; and right after breakfast you heard
that the Butler Guards were out, and you ran up to the court-house yard
with the other fellows to see if it was true. It was not true, just yet,
perhaps, but it came true during the forenoon, and in the meantime the
court-house yard was a scene of festive preparation. There was going to
be an oration and a public dinner, and they were already setting the
tables under the locust-trees. There may have been some charge for this
dinner, but the boys never knew of that, or had any question of the
bounty that seemed free as the air of the summer day.