It was often necessary for the showmen to have their breakfast at three o'clock in the morning, and this, as the reader may well imagine, made it impracticable for the keeper of the little country hotel to go to bed at all. He usually stayed up all night on a "star" occasion of this kind and cooked for his deluge of boarders. The following little incident may illustrate the situation better, perhaps, than I can tell it: We had just hired a man to travel with our wagons. He was a "green" hand; but he felt it necessary, of course, to fill the proprietor of the little hotel where we stopped with an appreciation of a showman's importance. He got up about two o'clock to attend to the horses. As he passed out he came upon the hotel keeper who, with sleeves rolled up, was working for all he was worth.
The new attaché stretched himself, yawned and said: "I'll tell you what, this is the last season that I'm goin' to travel with a show." "Yes," replied the other, "I guess—next to keeping a tavern—the circus business is about the hardest goin'."
We once had with our show a woman whom we were exhibiting for her immense size. To enhance her value as a feature in the eyes of the countrymen she wore a gorgeous crown set with cheap but flashy stones. The crier would tell the people that the crown had been presented to the woman by the Prince of Wales and that it cost, in England, 5,000 pounds. Then the people would go in, examine it, and exclaim: "See the green diamonds and the blue diamonds and the red diamonds!" Once, when I was in a hotel in Wisconsin, I heard two waitresses talking about the show. One said she did not believe the crown cost such an amount. The other said:
"Well; we can't tell, of course; we only know what we hear—but wasn't it beautiful!"
XII
HOW THE GREAT NEW YORK AQUARIUM WAS MADE AND LOST
Every prominent showman has had some venture into which he has put his whole heart. Nothing in my career touched and moved me like the great New York Aquarium enterprise. Into this I not only put a fortune—more hundreds of thousands of dollars than were ever put into anything of the kind before or since—but I also invested the ambitions of my life.
I was inspired by a profound desire to promote the interests of natural science in what appeared to me its most picturesque and attractive field—the marine world; and everything concerned in this mammoth undertaking exercised a strange fascination over me. All commercialism vanished, and I was as true and devoted a student of the wonders which I had collected as was the most erudite scientist that had ever looked upon that strange assemblage of creatures from the depths of arctic and torrid oceans.
Night after night I remained alone in the great museum for the purpose of studying the habits of those fishes which displayed their most peculiar traits while the world slept. The finale of this enterprise was, it seems to me, in keeping with its remarkable character, and anything less picturesque than that which actually transpired in this connection would have fallen short of poetic justice. It is not too much to say that never before had the scientific world been permitted to view so comprehensive a collection of the varied and almost numberless types of deep sea life.