Billy Dutton, it is said, performed the great feat while a member of Lake's circus, at Elkhorn, Illinois, in 1860, at a rehearsal, in the presence of John Lawton, the famous clown, now with Robinson's circus. Dutton was ambitious to have it to say he did it, and did not make the attempt with the intention of repeating it. He made the leap from a high spring-board. Dutton said then he would not try it again, and that his lighting upon his feet was an accident, as he could not control his body after turning the second time. Frank Starks, who was well known in Cincinnati, undertook the feat at the fair grounds in Indianapolis in 1870, for a wager of $100. In the first attempt he turned three times, but alighted in a sitting posture. Every one was satisfied with the result, and the money was tendered him. He proudly refused it, saying he would repeat it, and light upon his feet before he felt sufficiently justified in taking the $100. He did repeat it, but struck on his head, dislocating his neck, and death resulted a few hours afterward. Bob Stickney accomplished the great feat when fourteen years of age, while practising in a gymnasium on Fourteenth Street, New York. William Stein, an attache of Robinson's circus, was one of the persons who held the blanket for him to alight upon. Stickney says he believes he could do it again, but would not attempt it for less than $10,000, being fully convinced that the chances for his final exit from the arena would be good on that occasion. Sam Reinhardt, a former leaper, now a saloon-keeper at Columbus, when with the Cooper & Bailey Circus at Toledo, in 1860, not being satisfied with turning double somersaults, tried to add another revolution. He turned twice and a half, alighting on the broad of his back, and was disabled for a short period. The fact that a triple somersault was ever accomplished before a circus audience, after due announcement, and under the same conditions as double somersaults are performed—namely, landing on a mattress—may be seriously doubted. The best informed circus men say that it cannot be done with anything even like comparative safety except in the sheets, a blanket held by a number of men being used to catch the alighting performer. It is claimed, also, that it has never been accomplished except in that way.
BICYCLE RIDING EXTRAORDINARY.
CHAPTER XLIII.
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.