"You needn't t-t-take off any more c-c-clothes, for if it ain't all on your b-b-back, you've lost it."
"If it is, I suppose you have!" Barnum replied, pulling the whole shirt from off his back!
Such a shriek of laughter as burst forth from the crowd was scarcely ever heard, and certainly such a blank countenance as old Darrow exhibited it would be hard to conceive. Seeing that he was most incontinently "done for," and perceiving that his neighbor Hough had helped to do it, he ran up to him in great anger, and shaking his fist in his face, exclaimed:
"H-H-Hough, you infernal r-r-rascal, to go against your own neighbor in favor of a D-D-Danbury man. I'll pay you for that some time, you see if I d-d-don't."
All hands went up to the bar and drank with a hearty good will, for it was seldom that Darrow got taken in, and he was such an inveterate joker they liked to see him paid in his own coin. Never till the day of his death did he hear the last of the "whole shirt."
CHAPTER V. BEGINNING AS A SHOWMAN.
FINDING HIS TRUE VOCATION—THE PURCHASE OF JOICE HETH—EVIDENCE AS TO HER AGE—HER DEATH—SIGNOR VIVALLA—A VISIT TO WASHINGTON—JOINING A TRAVELLING CIRCUS—CONTROVERSIES WITH MINISTERS—THE VICTIM OF A PRACTICAL JOKE.
Barnum was now satisfied that he had not yet found his proper level. He had not yet entered the business for which nature had designed him. There was only a prospect of his going on from this to that, as his father had done before him, trying many callings but succeeding in none. He had not yet discovered that love of amusement is one of the strongest passions of the human heart. This, however, was a lesson that he was soon to learn; and he was to achieve both fame and fortune as a caterer to the public desire for entertainment.
Philosophizing on this theme in later years, Mr. Barnum once said: "The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which entrances empires and secures for the gifted artist a worldwide fame which princes well might envy. Men, women and children, who cannot live on gravity alone, need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is in a business established by the Author of our nature. If he worthily fulfils his mission, and amuses without corrupting, he need never feel that he has lived in vain."
In the summer of 1835, Mr. Barnum was visited by Mr. Coley Bartram, of Reading, Connecticut, who told him that he had owned an interest in a remarkable negro woman, who was confidently believed to be one hundred and sixty-one years old and to have been the nurse of Washington. Mr. Bartram showed him a copy of an advertisement in The Pennsylvania Inquirer for July 15, 1835, as follows: