AN ADVENTURE WITH GIANTS.
I was in the office of the old _Evening Post_, at St. Louis one
afternoon in 1879, when it was invaded by Capt. M. Y. Bates and wife,
the tallest married couple in the world. They were travelling with
Cole's circus, and by invitation of the managing editor, who wanted
them interviewed, they visited the newspaper office. A very small
reporter had been assigned to do the talking, and he waited patiently
around the establishment until a carriage drove up to the door and a
shout went up, "Here they come," at the sound of which the interviewer
hurriedly made for the waste-basket which was under the table. Whether
the giant and giantess saw the diminutive reporter or not they kept on
coming in, and the scribe saw no other way out of it than to dive into
the ample recesses of the basket, and nestle upon a bed of school-girl
poetry, statesmen's essays, and applications from last year's and the
coming year's college graduates, for managing editorship. There is a
barbaric sesquepedalianism (which is a good long word to ring into
a chapter about six-storied people) and a prevailing atmosphere of
suffocation in such a waste-basket; nevertheless, the tiny reporter
crouched closer as the Brobdignaggian people approached with a rabble
that noised their heels upon the floor, their tongues against the
roofs of their mouths, and that made things look and sound as if all
the quarreling powers of Europe had set their combined forces down
in the _Evening Post_ office for the special purpose of driving the
senses of its whole staff out through the top of the building. But all
this was seraphic bliss compared with the awful moment when the giant
captain deliberately sat down on the table just over the waste-basket.
It would take a million horse-power jackscrew, I should think, to
raise the fallen hopes of the reporter just then. A man stands some
chance if a custom-house falls on him hurriedly, but chance crushed to
earth never rises again, when a giant like this is threatening to make
any easy-chair out of him. I suppose nearly everybody has heard the
funny story about the fat woman and the living skeleton, in a New York
museum, who fell in love with each other. They got along very nicely
for a while, and were as affectionate as if the two had pooled their
issues of flesh, blood, and bone, and divided up so that each tipped
the scale at two hundred and sixty pounds, instead of the whale-like
spouse tipping the scale at four hundred and ninety, while the skeleton
husband did not need any more than a thirty-pound section of the beam
to balance his weight. They were as happy as the sweetest of the
singing birds until one day the husband allowed his heart to stray off
to the Circassian girl, who had been originally born in Ireland, but
had her hair curled for a short side-show engagement. Mr. Skeleton was
making the weightiest kind of love to the fair Circassian for probably
a month before the fat woman was made aware of the fact. Then the
monster that is usually represented as green-eyed, took possession of
her. She kept a careful vigil of all "Skin-and-bones'" doings, as she
called him, until one day she found him during the noon hour, with his
lean arms around the Circassian girl's neck, and his thin lips glued
to her pouting labials of cherry-red. It is impossible to describe
the terrible manner in which she swooped down upon Mr. Skeleton. It
was enough to say that she covered space with alarming rapidity, and
taking her thirty-pound husband by the back of the neck, shook an Irish
jig out of his rattling bones, after which she threw him on the floor
and deliberately sat upon him. The vivacious showman who told this
story said a millstone could not have made a nicer sheet of wall-paper
out of the living skeleton, had one fallen on him, and only for the
buttons on his vest he could have been pushed through the crack under
the door, after the fat woman got through with him. But to come back
to Capt. Bates, the table upon which he had seated himself groaned,
and the little reporter moaned. The fleeting seconds were magnified
into centuries, and the man in the waste-basket afterwards told me
that he felt himself shrinking into something like a homœopathic pill.
The table, however, appeared to stand the pressure a great deal better
than the person under it, and it was sometime before the latter came
to reconcile himself to the safety of his situation. When he did so he
peeped out.
The sight that met his gaze was a curious one. There was the great
towering giantess, of pleasing features and with nothing of a
"fee-fo-fum" air about her, quietly seated in the editor's chair,
taking in the situation as if she had been accustomed to the thing
since Adam's father was bald-headed. And there were the editors and
news-hunters gazing on admiringly, with one or two of them particularly
awe-stricken and wild-eyed. But the background was the thing. It was
a circus in itself. At the doors and windows, upon tables and chairs,
and perched further up on the top of an inoffensive and weak partition,
as high as the giant himself, was a ghastly array of gaping mouths
and bursting eyes in a setting of eager and dirty faces,--inside and
out, high and low, anywhere and everywhere around the institution
within seeing distance were newsboys and boot-blacks till one couldn't
rest; with a dim and distant horizon of more respectable visitors who
had been tempted in by the unusual scene and noise. After the usual
courtesies had been interchanged, the editor remarked:--
"I had a young fellow assigned to interview you, Captain, but I don't
know where he is just now."
"Perhaps he's gone to git an extension ladder," suggested a forward
newsboy.
"No, Skinny," said another; "he told me he was going to get old Stout's
balloon."
At this moment there was a commotion under the table. The giant's foot
had swung back and collided with the waste-basket. To say it was a big
foot would be like calling the pyramid of Cheops a brick-bat or the
Colossus of Rhodes an Italian plaster-cast. They say Chicago girls have
big feet; I don't know this to be a fact, but if they have anything
like the pedal spread of Captain Bates they are entitled to the
credit generally given them of greatness in this way. At any rate the
collision between the foot and the basket caused the recondite reporter
to disclose his whereabouts. The managing editor qualified his conduct
as unbecoming a newspaper man, and the giant himself gently requested
the scribe to come forward.
"You won't make a watch-charm out of me?" queried the reporter,
apprehensively.
"No, no," the giant answered, in an assuring tone.
"Nor a scarf-pin?"
The giant said he wouldn't.
This allayed the reporter's fears, and he came forward from the
atmosphere of "respectfully declined" literature in which he had
been. Capt. Bates's greeting was most kind, and so was that of his
wife. The reporter saw at once there had been no necessity for his
previous timidity, and managing to get within a couple of yards of the
giant's ear, he excused his awkward and silly actions. A pleasant chat
followed, in which the giant and giantess gave brief outlines of their
personal history.
Capt. Bates is now (1879) thirty-five years of age, stands seven feet
eleven and one-half inches in height, and weighs about four hundred and
eighty pounds. He is well put together, handsome in features, genial
in speech, and has the reputation of being a sharp, shrewd man of the
world. Mrs. Bates is thirty-two years old, of the same height as her
husband, although she really seems to be taller, and turns the scales
at about four hundred and twenty pounds. She is thinner in form, but
of excellent physique, is handsome, and has the same frank and smiling
expression on her face as that constantly worn by her husband. She
says she likes the show business, because it brings her in contact
with so many persons. The Captain, though, having been in it about
twelve years, and accumulated considerable means, does not care much
about parading his colossal proportions before the public. It has been
his desire of late years to live in private, quietly on his farm in
Ohio, where the couple have a house built expressly for them, with
doors, windows, furniture, etc., on a giant scale; but until this year
they received so many handsome offers that they forsook the sod for
the sawdust, and the plow for the platform. In 1880, I think it was,
a giant child was born to this enormous couple. The infant weighed
twenty-eight pounds at birth.
After listening patiently to the Captain and his wife as they spoke
of themselves, the little reporter whom I have introduced the reader
to already, suggested as he nearly dislocated his neck in looking up
at the lofty couple, that it would have been a nice thing to be around
when they were making love to each other, but Mrs. Bates said that
was rather a delicate matter to call up, and the reporter subsided.
I could not help thinking, however, that a fellow must feel awful
queer with four hundred and odd pounds of sweetheart upon his knee.
Himalayan hugging going on all the time, and love-sighs that needed a
Jacob's ladder to come from the heart-depths playing above his head
like mountain zephyrs around the Pike's Peak signal service station.
And then when a fellow felt his love away down in his boots, what an
Atlantic cable job it must have been to find out exactly where it was!
And the old garden gate, how it must have been like the gates that
brave Samson shouldered with probably a little extra bracing to it.
And what chewing-gum swopping must have gone on, and ice cream eating,
perhaps a plate as large as a Northland _jokel_ at a time, and no two
spoons in it, either? Oh, but it must have been a heavenly thing!
"You weren't afraid of her big brother, Captain, were you?" friendly
interrogated the reporter.
"Oh, no; not at all," answered the Captain.
"If you sat down on him once you could have sold him for a bundle of
tissue paper, couldn't you?"
"That is not it, my boy," said the Captain. "She didn't have any big
brother."
"Oh, yes, I see."
Then the discourse turned into other channels, intended to be of
special interest to _splacmucks_--as the Brobdignaggians called
ordinary mortals--who are contemplating marriage with giantesses.
"I suppose Mrs. Bates does not wield an ordinary rolling-pin?" the
reporter half queried, addressing himself to Capt. Bates.
"No, indeed," the lady herself replied, laughingly. "I have one made
expressly for my own use, from one of the largest of the Yosemite
Valley trees."
"And you lay it on the old man now and then?" the reporter asked.
"I can answer for that," put in the Captain. "She sometimes brings it
down so heavily on the rear elevation of my skull that it feels as if
I had run against a pile-driver on a drunk or lost my way under the
hammers of a quartz mill."
Mrs. Bates certainly had the physical strength to make a rolling-pin
dance a lively jig in any direction, and if the weapon is anything at
all like what it is here represented to be, Thor's celebrated hammer
will have to go to the hospital as a weak and debilitated concern until
the giants lay their domestic difficulties aside and retire permanently
from active service.
"It must be a gigantic thing when the Captain comes home late at night,
from the lodge, you know, falls through the kitchen window into a pan
of dishes, and after stumbling up stairs goes to bed with his boots
on?" the reporter insinuated, as he looked sorrowfully at the giantess.
"Oh, he never does that," said the lady; and after a minute she added,
"and he'd better not."
The giantess looked knowingly at the giant who looked down at the
floor. My thoughts wreathed themselves fondly around the Yosemite-tree
rolling-pin, and I guess Capt. Bates's thoughts were turned in the same
direction.
"Nobody ever dares to write _billet-doux_ to Mrs. Bates," said the
reporter. "I suppose you know circus and theatrical people are subject
to that sort of thing."
"Not any body that I know of," the Captain answered.
"And I suppose if anybody did they wouldn't care about having you know
it, either?" said the little _Evening Post_ man.
[Illustration: GIANTESS.]
[Illustration: GIANT.]
The Captain made no reply, but a mysterious kind of look crowded into
his eyes, and if anybody around the newspaper office had dared to
entertain a spark of affection for the giantess he could see at once
that he didn't stand the ghost of a show while the giant was around.
"Now, Captain," the tiny and timid reporter remarked, moving to a
distance, "I know you like travelling, and I have one more question
I would like to ask you. It is about hotel accommodations. Don't you
occasionally have to hang your head or feet over the ends of the beds
you encounter?"
This question disgusted the Captain and he rose from the table
indignantly, as did Mrs. Bates from the editorial chair, and doubling
themselves up as they reached the doorway they majestically swept out
of the newspaper office, and stepping into their carriage were driven
away.
Another notable giant is Colonel Routh Goshan, who was born in the city
of Jerusalem, on the 5th day of May, '37, of Arabian parents. He is
the youngest of a family of 15 children, who like himself, father and
mother were all giants. He served with distinction in the Crimean war,
and afterwards in the Mexican army.
Colonel Goshen stands 7 feet 11 inches in his stocking feet, and
measures 75 inches around the chest, 25 inches around the arm, and
wears a No. 11 shoe. His weight is 666 pounds.