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Show I inn mt The Solitary an SorrowM Life ef Joeepb ' ; , Kgrrick, the Elephant 1 Han.. , IE "WAS A LOATHSOME SIGHT. And the Children Tied When They Saw Him His Visit to the f ". ' Theater. We can remember "no in4ited tale that speaks so to th heart at once of the cruelty of life and the beauty of human , onipassion as the true atory closed by a sentence ra the newspapers announcing that Joseph Merrick, tho "elephant Ban," was dead. Imagine a human soul clothed in a body so unspeakably frightful that seeing see-ing it men turned sick with loathing and women fainted,' s being; who had to be ' conveyed from place to place in secret; who hardly dared! to- venture abroad ven by night; who, finding his fellow creature ran from hint, gTew terrified by the terror he created, and shuddered rn dark- comers lik a hunted beast. Imagine ba drive by starvation to accept ac-cept a showman' offer and be exhibited to the most' brutal, of audiences, that commonly enough shrieked and ran pell melf from the tent as soon as the curtain wa drawn. Early in, 1886 Frederick Treves, one of the surgeons of the London hospital, found Merrick in penny show, in a room, off the Whitecbapel road, crouching crouch-ing behind an old curtain aad trying to warm himself over a brick that was heated by a gas jet. Mr. Treves went tip to hint not only without fear or loath-1 loath-1 ivg, but wit sympathy. For the first 1 time in ta life of t wenty-f our years Merrick Mer-rick heard a kind word and was spoken to like a man. The effect was curious. It made him afraid at first. He shrank as an ordinary man would from something uncanny. un-canny. Then, as he began to realize the tratB(Bbrok into sobs of gratitude. Hays and tsb weeks passed, however, before recovered from the shock of Bearing a compasskmato word. The poKe prohibited bis show on the ground of public decency. So he went to Belgium, where again the pofioe in-' in-' trfere4, and where an agent decamped with his money. Merrick was left destitute desti-tute and starving iuthe streets of a for-' pign town, where the ignorant mob thought him a fiend. . Ea,eane back to London how, no n one quite know. At every station .'and landing place, crowds dogged him. Steanen refused to have him oa board. 1 But he came bark to London, because in London lived the only man who had ever given him a kind word. He made way to the London hospital, found Mr. Treves, who had him lodged for a time in an attic m the hospital, and determined de-termined to find a permanent shelter for him. ' ' But now it was found that no institu tion would receive him. The royal hospital hos-pital for incurables and the British home ' , f or incurables alike declined to take him in unless sufikdent funds were forthcoming- to pay for his maintenance for life. He himself begged that he might be placed in a blind hospital. It is hard to match the pathos of this plea. Then in November, 1888, Carr Gomm, chairman of the London hospital, wrote to ' The Times asking help for this case, and the British public responded. A . room was built for Merrick on the ground floor in a remote wing of the hospital, hos-pital, and there, surrounded with books, flowers and a hundred tokens of the kindness that is really quick in the public pub-lic heart, he lived. He. had found many friends the Prince and Princess of Wales, Mr. Gladstone, Glad-stone, Mrs. Kendal and others. To Mrs. Kendal is due the happy suggestion that Merrick should be taken to see the Christmas pantomime at Drury Lane. She engaged the royal box; she had him brought to the theatre, and took every precaution that no strange eye should (tee him. Hidden from the house behind the curtains of. the box, the "elephant man" tasted an hour or two of intoxicating intoxicat-ing happiness. It was all real to him the fairies, the splendor and the jewels. Merrick, in spite of his hideous exterior ex-terior and terrible experiences, was in his way a gentle sentimentalist, and gushed forth at times, under the happy conditions of his life at the hospital, in verse modeled on the hymns of Dr. Watts, in which he gave utterance to feelings of gratitude, the sincerity of which none ever questioned. It was a tender heart that was beating beneath a mask more hideous than that of Orson. Above all, it was a heart that was filled with love for the man who was literally bia saviour, who first spoke kindly to him, who rescued him from a fate a thousand times worse than death, and to the end was both his doctor and his friend. Recently, it was only Mr. Treves who could thoroughly understand the poor creature's maimed utterances; and to Mr. Treves he clung to the last with the wistful trust and affection of a dumb animal. London Speaker. |