The Captain made no reply, but a mysterious kind of look crowded into his eyes, and if anybody around the newspaper office had dared to entertain a spark of affection for the giantess he could see at once that he didn't stand the ghost of a show while the giant was around.
"Now, Captain," the tiny and timid reporter remarked, moving to a distance, "I know you like travelling, and I have one more question I would like to ask you. It is about hotel accommodations. Don't you occasionally have to hang your head or feet over the ends of the beds you encounter?"
This question disgusted the Captain and he rose from the table indignantly, as did Mrs. Bates from the editorial chair, and doubling themselves up as they reached the doorway they majestically swept out of the newspaper office, and stepping into their carriage were driven away.
Another notable giant is Colonel Routh Goshan, who was born in the city of Jerusalem, on the 5th day of May, '37, of Arabian parents. He is the youngest of a family of 15 children, who like himself, father and mother were all giants. He served with distinction in the Crimean war, and afterwards in the Mexican army.
Colonel Goshen stands 7 feet 11 inches in his stocking feet, and measures 75 inches around the chest, 25 inches around the arm, and wears a No. 11 shoe. His weight is 666 pounds.
CHAPTER XLIV.
THE "TATTOOED TWINS."
Wanted—The address of some one who can tattoo with Indian ink on the person. A. J. H., No. —, —th Street.
This advertisement appeared in a St. Louis Sunday morning paper. The number and the street are not given for reasons that will at once present themselves to every intelligent reader. Now there is sometimes that in an advertisement which attracts one like a pretty girl. A few lines may furnish a neat little intellectual flirtation, and very frequently can, like a coy and pretty maiden, keep coaxing a fellow along until he is perfectly lost in the maze of an affection that he has neither the tact nor the willingness to try to escape from. As soon as my eyes lit upon them and the words from the capital W in the beginning to the period at the end were taken in, I was irrevocably gone on them. Like the immortal J. N., I immediately lifted the veil and looked at the suppositious sanctuary behind it, and then saw that walking art gallery, Capt. Costentenus—known to thousands of people who saw him travelling as the tattooed man—lying bound hand and foot upon the earth and surrounded by half a dozen Chinese Tartars, who were industriously pricking him with pointed instruments, which were ever and anon dipped into the little basins of blackish-blue liquid. The scene changed suddenly into a room at No. —, —th Street, and the Tartars were metamorphosed into a single individual of a decidedly Caucasian aspect, but with features wrought in that indistinctness which very frequently is characteristic of the shapes and forms seen in waking dreams, and the Greek Captain was replaced by an equally Caucasian subject, who was quietly undergoing the operations of having his breast tattooed in the most lavish and picturesque manner that the artist knew how. This idea fastened itself in my mind to such an extraordinary extent that merely for the purpose of gratifying a certain instinctive curiosity, as well as to see if my suppositions were correct, I called at the house indicated next afternoon.