“Vell, vot of it?”
“Because, Rabin, if I should look in that pocket and still it ain’t there, then I drop dead.”
§ 366 Special Extra—To Be Read Only in Leap Year
It must be all of thirty-five years now since the thing happened. But the memory of it still abides in my mind, as the finest exhibition of spontaneous humor that ever came within my own experience.
I was a small boy in a Kentucky town. John Robinson’s circus paid us its annual visit. For the afternoon performance, my father took me and my younger brother and half a dozen little girls and boys, the children of neighbors, along with him. At the last moment two old ladies joined the party. One of them lived across the street from us and the other just around the corner. Mrs. Slawson, the senior of the pair, was exceedingly deaf. She used one of those old-fashioned, flexible rubber ear-trumpets with a tip at one end and a bell-like aperture at the other. Her crony, Mrs. Ream, had a high-pitched, far-carrying voice.
On a blue-painted bench, with the old ladies at one end, my father at the other and the row of youngsters in between, we watched the show. The time came for the crowning feature of a circus of those times. Perhaps the reader is of sufficient age to recall what this was. Elephants and camels and horses would be close-ranked at the foot of a springboard. Along a steep runway, which slanted down to this springboard, would flash in order, one behind another, the full strength of the troupe. The acrobats would tumble over the backs of the animals to alight gracefully upon a thick padded mattress. The clowns would sprawl on the backs of the living obstacles. Always there was one clown who, dashing down the runway, would suddenly halt and fling his peaked cap across. There was another, dressed as a country woman, who, as he somersaulted, lost a pair of bifurcated white garments, while the audience whooped its delight.
This season, though, a culminating treat had been provided by the management: The lesser gymnasts had done their stunts. Now, to the head of the runway mounted the premier tumbler. He stood there grandly erect in his rose-colored fleshings, his arms folded across his swelling breast and his head almost touching the sagging canvas of the tentroof. The band, for the moment, stopped playing. The ringmaster mounted the ring-back and proclaimed that Johnnie O’Brien, foremost athlete of the world, would now perform his death-defying and unparalleled feat of turning a triple somersault over two elephants, three camels and four horses! For many this announcement had a special interest; they knew Johnnie O’Brien was a native-born son of our town.
So an expectant hush fell upon the assemblage. Mrs. Slawson turned to Mrs. Ream, and in the silence her voice rose as she asked:
“What did he say?”
Mrs. Ream brought the blunderbus end of Mrs. Slawson’s ear-trumpet to her lips and, through its sinuous black length, in a voice so shrill that instantly every head there was turned toward the pair of them, she answered: