Prof. Rossi came around very early yesterday morning to put the elephants through a little drill preparatory to going into the performance regularly to-morrow afternoon. All would have continued well had Nellie been accustomed to having pigs in the house. But such was not the case. At least the Hippodrome janitor says so. He blames it all on Marcelline’s pig, though he declares that no other tenants of his apartment house ever have complained about the pig.
But Nellie was clearly of the opinion that a pig was out of place in the same house with herself. At all events when she heard that pig squeal and saw him come romping in his usual debonair manner over the stage, she gave one wild blast of her trumpet and determined to go elsewhere. In fact she[Pg 220] went elsewhere, did Nellie, and that forthwith. But she went out, as a perfect lady should, by the customary stage entrance, taking most of it with her and subsequently accumulating large portions of the storm door as well.
Once in Forty-third street Nellie turned toward the east. She was closely pursued by Bill Milligan, a Hippodrome groom, who endeavored with the aid of a shovel to dissuade her from her intention to travel. Mr. Milligan was subsequently reproached severely by Prof. Rossi because he did not use a goad. But Mr. Milligan rejoined with some asperity that he was shaving at the time Nellie tiptoed past him and it was only by the merest chance that he happened to notice her. “And,” added Mr. Milligan, “I don’t use no goad to shave with, anyhow.”
Putting this aside for the moment, the fact remains that Nellie proceeded eastward as far as Fifth avenue. Here she turned to the south. As she approached Forty-second street Traffic Policeman John Finnerty raised one commanding hand, thereby stopping all traffic that had been previously headed in Nellie’s direction. But Policeman Finnerty complains that Nellie did not obey his order to stop. He says he can prove it, too, because there were a number of persons around and several of them in all probability noticed the elephant and can swear that she did not stop when he raised his hand. For a moment, he says, he thought of arresting her, but abandoned the idea, thinking perhaps it would be making too much of a trifling infraction of the traffic rules by a stranger in the city.
At all events Nellie turned to the eastward again when she reached Forty-second street and moved along as far as Second avenue without meeting a soul she knew. In fact she didn’t meet so very many persons face to face, though there were quite a number of people in the lobby of the Manhattan Hotel and the Grand Central Station, and a little group now and then shinning up a casual lamp post or roosting on the top of a subway pagoda. And there weren’t more than 10,000 or 20,000 behind her either.
It looked so lonesome in Forty-second street that Nellie turned southward again when she got to Second avenue out of sheer yearning for human companionship. As a matter of fact there were several persons in Second avenue until a few seconds after Nellie turned the corner, but they all seemed to be in some haste and went away from there before Nellie[Pg 221] could come up to them. In fact Second avenue was so solitary a place that when Nellie got to Thirty-fourth street she thought she would try that just for luck.
She would probably have continued right on to the ferry because nobody thereabouts appeared to have any objection, had it not been for the fact that a fire engine and hose cart galloped through First avenue to answer an alarm turned in from the box at First avenue and Thirty-second street. Nellie was not interested in fire engines. So she took to the sidewalk in front of 334, and at 336 she seemed to say to herself: “This is the place I’ve been looking for.”
At all events she entered the doorway at that number. On the ground floor is Henry Gruner’s barber shop. Henry was shaving a customer when Nellie passed his window and turned into the hall next door. The customer left the chair so promptly that he nearly got his throat cut and disappeared down the street with the towel still about his neck, in the direction of the East River. Nellie walked right through the narrow hall, taking with her a segment of the balustrade. The door that leads into the back yard was not built to accommodate elephants, as Mr. Diehl explained some time later, but Nellie managed to wiggle through it, though she knocked down about half the coping in the process.
High board fences separate 336 from 338, and 338 from 340. That is to say, they did. They don’t now, because Nellie walked through them as if they had been paper. But before this she took a look in at the kitchen window on the ground floor of 336, where Mrs. Gruner, the barber’s wife, and their children, Tessie, Henry and Louisa, were eating breakfast. The happy family looked up from their oatmeal and beheld an uncommon face at the window, the face of an elephant seeking companionship.
Mrs. Gruner and all the little Gruners experienced spots before the eyes and a sudden loss of appetite. In fact, they beat it for the street. It was then that Nellie, again abandoned, moved into 338. There was nobody there either, except up above on the fire escape. So she moved through the fence into 340. Every one had gone away from there too. It was then that the elephant broke down and wept. At least, she lifted up her trunk and trumpeted to the high heavens.