|THE cultivated two-headed girl has visited the west. It is very rare
that a town the size of Laramie experiences the rare treat of witnessing
anything so enjoyable. In addition to the mental feast which such a
thing affords, one goes away feeling better--feeling that life has more
in it to live for, and is not after all such a vale of tears as he had
at times believed it.
Through the trials and disappointments of this earthly pilgrimage,
the soul is at times cast down and discouraged. Man struggles against
ill-fortune and unlooked-for woes, year after year, until he becomes
misanthropical and soured, but when a two-headed girl comes along and
he sees her it cheers him up. She speaks to his better nature in two
different languages at one and the same time, and at one price.
When I went to the show I felt gloomy and apprehensive. The eighteenth
ballot had been taken and the bulletins seemed to have a tiresome
sameness. The future of the republic was not encouraging. I felt as
though, if I could get first cost for the blasted thing, I would sell
it.
I had also been breaking in a pair of new boots that day, and spectators
had been betting wildly on the boots, while I had no backers at three
o'clock in the afternoon, and had nearly decided to withdraw on the last
ballot. I went to the entertainment feeling as though I should criticise
it severely.
The two-headed girl is not beautiful. Neither one of her, in fact, is
handsome. There is quite a similarity between the two, probably because
they have been in each other's society a great deal and have adopted the
same ways.
She is an Ethiopian by descent and natural choice, being about the same
complexion as Frank Miller's oil blacking, price ten cents.
She was at one time a poor slave, but by her winning ways and genuine
integrity and genius, she has won her way to the hearts of the American
people. She has thoroughly demonstrated the fact that two heads are
better than one.
A good sized audience welcomed this popular favorite. When she came
forward to the footlights and made her two-ply bow she was greeted by
round after round of applause from the _elite_ of the city.
I felt pleased and gratified. The fact that a recent course of
scientific lectures here was attended by from fifteen to thirty people,
and the present brilliant success of the two-headed girl proved to me,
beyond a doubt, that we live in an age of thought and philosophical
progress.
Science may be all right in its place, but does it make the world
better? Does it make a permanent improvement on the minds and thoughts
of the listener? Do we go away from such a lecture feeling that we have
made a grand stride toward a glad emancipation from the mental thraldom
of ignorance and superstition? Do people want to be assailed, year after
year, with a nebular theory, and the Professor Huxley theory of natural
selections and things of that nature?
No! 1,000 times no!
They need to be led on quietly by an appeal to their better natures.
They need to witness a first-class bureau of monstrosities, such as men
with heads as big as a band wagon, women with two heads, Cardiff giants,
men with limbs bristling out all over them like the velvety bloom on a
prickly pear.
When I get a little leisure, and can attend to it,
I am going to organize a grand constellation of living wonders of this
kind, and make thirteen or fourteen hundred farewell tours with it, not
so much to make money, but to meet a long-felt, want of the American
people for something which will give a higher mental tone to the tastes
of those who never lag in their tireless march toward perfection.