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Well, as I said, I went to this shelter for freaks and looked them over.
There was the fat lady who was blown up twice a day with the air pump.
A kid in front of me stuck a pin in her arm and punctured her.
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There was the living skeleton who was fed on pork and beans three times
a day.
There was the Circassian girl who paid twelve dollars for her wig.
When we got to the glass eater, the real fun began.
There was a yap and his wife standing where they could get a good view
of the performance.
They watched him, enraptured for a time, and finally the woman says:
"Hiram, just look at that fellow eating window glass."
"That's nothing," says Hiram, "our little Reuben can do the same thing."
"G'wan," says the woman, "how's that?"
"Why, if he eats little green apples, won't he have pains on the
inside?"
Then we passed on to the ventriloquist.
"What's a ventriloquist, Hiram?" says Mandy.
"Why," says Hiram, "it's a fellow what stands on one side of the room
and talks to hisself from the other."
But the climax came when we got to the wonderful wax figure, recently
imported from Paris at the unheard of price of ten thousand dollars.
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I looked that wax figure over and something about it struck me as being
familiar.
Finally it came to me all at once.
It was Sim Johnson, who borrowed twenty dollars from me out in Chicago.
So I went over.
"Hello, Sim," says I. He never moved a muscle.
"Don't you know me, Sim?" says I.
"Go 'way," says he, without moving his lips.
That made me mad as a hornet, and I says:
"Go 'way? Not much. Who is the wall-eyed, bandy-legged, beer-guzzling
harp, who borrowed twenty dollars from me, out in Chicago?"
He never said a word. That got me madder.