NED’S STORY.
“I will tell you what happened in the western part of the State, for Frank’s benefit. Our family were summering at a small town near the mountains some years ago, when a circus passed through that section, stopping for a day at our town. Every wall of every house that presented surface enough had for weeks been spread over with the marvellous high colored illustrations of what were to be seen under that mighty, mystic canvas. They were the same pictures, or I should rather say works of art, combining the airy lightness and licensed fancy of Correggio with the Dutch fidelity of Rembrandt, which you have, perhaps, all seen at different times pasted, with weather-proof adherence, to any visible portion of public places. There were troops of monkeys, done in the blackest of colors, swinging from the greenest of trees, across the widest and bluest of rivers, by tails of impossible length and elasticity. There were ibexes leaping into bottomless abysses, thereby defeating the design of the artist, who would have them to alight upon their horns. There was the traditional polar bear, defending her cubs and leisurely lunching on a sandwich of two seals and a sailor. The actual bear in the circus, I have found by long experience, invariably dies at the previous stopping place, bequeathing, tenderly, its skin to the public of to-morrow, thereby undergoing a constancy of death and a multitude of bequests that would startle the profundity of a probate judge. There were pleasant side groups of men lassoing the giraffe and zebra, tripping the rhinoceros, and tearing off tigers from the very hams of elephants, on whose backs were huddled not quite a full regiment of soldiers in all stages of the manual of arms. But the chef d’œuvre was the centre-piece, as large as life, representing the clown, dressed in the American flag, with stars left out, with a hat reaching too infinite a point with its peak to be measured by any rule in conic sections, and cheeks too flamingly hectic for medical aid, handing, with the utmost gravity, a dish of boiled eggs to a sedate and diminutive mule, seated on its haunches, with its fore feet up on a barrel as its table—the only position, by the way, in which I think a mule could be safely approached with anything so far from its usual bill of fare as eggs.”
“Dog gone yo circus picturs!” interrupted Ben, raising up on one elbow to spit a stream of tobacco juice several yards behind us, “I c’n see them might’ nigh every year stuck ‘gin the warehouse over in town; go on wi yo yarn.”
“Well,” continued Ned, kindly taking no affront at Ben’s abrupt interruption, “I will hasten on. I merely wished to show how public expectation was worked up to a high pitch. After awhile the day came, and with it the circus—wagon after wagon, with tent poles and furniture; then the cages with the animals, all closed except the little lattice at the top, through which could now and then be heard the scream of a monkey or the cough of a lion, and then the gorgeous, gilded band chariot, with its music. Negroes, and boys, of which I was one, were almost crazy with excitement; we danced and shouted along the sidewalk in a promiscuous throng, ever keeping up with the long train of plumed horses drawing after them the gilded dragon, with its backful of brazen melody. But our glee was hushed into a very silence of admiration as we saw coming far behind the band chariot, with solemn grandeur, the great elephant, its broad ears waving like dusky fans, and its proboscis twisting, like a great serpent cut in two, slowly from side to side as he came on, looming like a gigantic tower, through the dust. As he approached and passed us, his small eyes twinkling so knowingly on the crowd, his keeper on a dappled horse, pacing along so fearlessly by his ponderous foreleg, and his dog trotting carelessly under his curling trunk, the open mouths of the crowd must have relieved him to a considerable extent of the dust he seemed to deprecate so much by his fanning ears.
“Well, to hurry on without so much detail, the canvas was pitched, the keeper carried the elephant to the river to cool out, and then brought him up, and tied him to one of the posts of the market house, which was near the pavilion, till the afternoon performance should commence. At the hour he went round, decked in his Oriental costume, and undid the fastening, and spoke in some unknown tongue to his mammoth charge. The elephant started, made a step forward and stopped, with a shrill cry of pain. The keeper looked up surprised, then uttering a few genuine American oaths, ordered him to move. Again the elephant made a great effort, and again stood still, with a prolonged scream. The keeper, now furious, approached, and drove his short training spike into him again and again. With each stab the poor creature would shriek and strain to the uttermost its cumbrous limbs, but all in vain, it could not move from where it stood. There was something so new in this apparent obstinacy that the keeper commenced to examine his position. He found one of the market house posts nearly pulled from its place, and the elephant’s tail, stretched to its last tenacity, sticking out straight as a poker towards the post, though not touching it by several inches, and having no visible connection whatever with it. Again he urged the animal forward, and again the elephant did his best to move. Just before his tail pulled out by the roots the post gave way, and tumbling over, hung dangling at the elephant’s heels. The keeper took the post in his hands, and, looking closely, found that a little spider had spun a web from the elephant’s tail to the post, and that this invisible thread had held him stronger than a chain of steel. Such a crowd had now gathered that the keeper found the elephant was drawing more people than the circus proper (or improper), and ordered him to move, that he might carry him under the canvas. The elephant obeying, moved forward, but the motion of his body set the post to swinging like a pendulum, which, increasing in its oscillation, at last commenced to thump him in the side harder than he fancied was comfortable. The thumps became more violent as he increased his speed, till, at last becoming frenzied with the blows, and the shouts, and hootings of the crowd, he broke away from the keeper, and ran hither and thither in the streets as fast as his unwieldy body could move, knocking over signs and boxes, breaking racks, frightening horses, and occasionally jostling over a clumsy man or two. At last he plunged through the great wide door of the court house, scraping his back against the brick arch as he did so. The post here fortunately got across the door and checked him. He pulled frantically, but the little web would not break; he then bent himself around as far as an elephant might, and tried to tear it off with his proboscis. The web, however, was so fine that it cut into even his tough trunk, and burying itself under the skin, held his proboscis fast to his tail. In his efforts now to disengage himself he fell, and lay helpless on the ground, and at last had to be rolled with an immense handspike over and over, like a very large hoop, till he got to the tent, or canvas, under which he was rolled, and perhaps unfastened.
“The prominent gentlemen of the town obtained part of the web, and forwarded it, with proper credentials, to several scientific societies for analysis. They each gave a different opinion in regard to the cause of its wonderful tenacity, but the people about the town always believed, and with very good reason, too, that the spider which spun it had been feeding on the beef brought to that market; and thus accounting for it, they ceased to wonder at the toughness of the web.”
“Ned, that’s a jolly good yarn,” said Frank, tossing the serpentine paring of a peach over his shoulder, and puffing out one jaw with a large section of the luscious fruit.
“Less hear the lord juke tell his’n,” said Ben, nodding towards Frank, and pushing himself up backwards by his hands to a large tree, against which he leaned, and folded his arms around one doubled-up knee; “should’n be suppris’n ef he can tell a buster, he’s in such good practice.”
“Well,” replied I, “we will leave all discussion of the merits of each one’s story to the umpire, and proceed. Frank, it is your time next.”