Vagabond Adventures

by Ralph Keeler

I have even known him to deliver a moral and instructive lecture on the nature and habits of the elephant, in a “grand combination” menagerie. Indeed, it was his custom, every afternoon and evening, to discourse on this branch of natural history when I last met my old friend and instructor in minstrelsy. He took great interest in his elephant, and especially in a living hippopotamus, which was the ruling attraction of his establishment,—just as he had once, I am bound in gratitude to say, taken great interest in me.

My place as his pupil was just then usurped by a small Irish lad, whom he pointed out to me, in an expansive feminine wig of flaxen curls and in puerile tights and tunic, with a most formidable gold-foil battle-axe in one hand, and the American flag in the other; personating, as Mr. Booker assured me, a water-nymph, on the silver-scaled but somewhat shaky chariot of Neptune.

This imposing car of the sea-god, I need scarcely add, formed part of the procession as it entered town, headed by the elephant, the living hippopotamus, and a brass-band seemingly on the point of death, so red and distended was the face of each strangling musician, and so nearly did each appear to have “poured through the mellow horn his pensive soul.”

The procession was still passing the balcony of the hotel on which we were standing, when Mr. Booker confided to me very gravely that his present pupil did not give him satisfaction. “He will never be a performer,” said the thoughtful veteran; “I don’t know what I can make of that boy, for,” pursued Mr. Booker, with his mind evidently more upon his pupil than upon me,—“for I don’t think he is even fit to write books.”

My former manager at this moment became so suddenly absorbed in the contemplation of a large spot on the very masculine tunic of his charge, the water-nymph, that he did not notice how frank he had been with me. It is due, however, to the magnanimity of Mr. Booker to say, that, whatever may be his private opinion of literature and of my change of profession, we are, and I hope always shall be, the most devoted of friends.

Whenever we meet he is sure to startle me with a new batch of reminiscences of our old-time companionship. What puzzles me most is that, as he advances in years, his accounts of my youthful exploits grow more extended and apocryphal. He has long since in these narratives got out of the horizon of my memory. I would not for the world accuse my old instructor of a want of candor, but I must say I think he has confounded me with other and later of his pupils.

It would be as useless as ill-mannered to contradict him, for he has told these stories so often that he believes them implicitly himself. Any unbiassed mind, moreover, will find excuse for the treachery of his memory in the devious and exciting course of his subsequent life, as corypheus of the saw-dusty ring, and especially as the zoologist of the living hippopotamus, and as the moral lecturer upon the manners and customs of the elephant.

I shall, however, in closing this account of the “Booker Troupe,” give a couple of condensed samples which will, I think, of themselves explain why I indulge in no more of Mr. Booker’s stories about myself. I give them as a simple act of justice to my old comrades. Having related my reminiscences of them with great freedom, it is no more than fair that one of them, at least, should be heard against me.

While admitting that a boy of thirteen may not have all the discretion in the world, still I herewith enter the solemn protest of my memory against the facts of the following statements.

Mr. Booker says that in the course of our travels we came to a city where I had relatives, and that I took occasion, as the best means of impressing them with my prosperity and independence, to appear in a different suit of clothes as often as I visited them, which was two or three times a day.