It was often necessary for the showmen to have their breakfast at three
o'clock in the morning, and this, as the reader may well imagine, made
it impracticable for the keeper of the little country hotel to go to
bed at all. He usually stayed up all night on a "star" occasion of this
kind and cooked for his deluge of boarders. The following little
incident may illustrate the situation better, perhaps, than I can tell
it: We had just hired a man to travel with our wagons. He was a "green"
hand; but he felt it necessary, of course, to fill the proprietor of
the little hotel where we stopped with an appreciation of a showman's
importance. He got up about two o'clock to attend to the horses. As he
passed out he came upon the hotel keeper who, with sleeves rolled up,
was working for all he was worth.
The new attache stretched himself, yawned and said: "I'll tell you
what, this is the last season that I'm goin' to travel with a show."
"Yes," replied the other, "I guess--next to keeping a tavern--the
circus business is about the hardest goin'."
We once had with our show a woman whom we were exhibiting for her
immense size. To enhance her value as a feature in the eyes of the
countrymen she wore a gorgeous crown set with cheap but flashy stones.
The crier would tell the people that the crown had been presented to
the woman by the Prince of Wales and that it cost, in England, 5,000
pounds. Then the people would go in, examine it, and exclaim: "See the
green diamonds and the blue diamonds and the red diamonds!" Once, when
I was in a hotel in Wisconsin, I heard two waitresses talking about the
show. One said she did not believe the crown cost such an amount. The
other said:
"Well; we can't tell, of course; we only know what we hear--but wasn't
it beautiful!"