Some of us who have brains love the
monkeys, they are so human.
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Rings Are So Muddy the Performers Have to Wear Rubber Boots--The
Freaks Present Pa with a Big Heart of Roses--The Show Closes and the
Bad Boy Starts West with His Pa in Search of Attractions for the
Coming Season.
Well, Missouri is the state to teach a circus humility, and we have
taken the thirty-third degree in the last ten days. It has rained nine
days and a half out of a possible ten days, and the mud is something we
never dreamed of before. The wagons have been mired in the mud on the
way from the train to the lot every day in the streets of cities big
enough to have street cars and electric lights. The cities have one or
two main streets paved, but the rest of the streets are just virgin
soil, and you have got to swim to get to the paved streets. When you
start away for the lot, it is like Washington crossing the Delaware.
And yet the people come from miles around to see the show, and everybody
rides a web-footed mule, that can wallow in the mud. They hitch the
mules to fences outside the tent, and while the performance is going on
the mules bray in concert and drown the band.
Pa has been wild ever since we struck Missouri, and no wonder, 'cause
everybody seems to lay everything in the way of weather on him.
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