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Show Immortality of the Circus. 1 The alchemists of old grey grey, generation after generation, seeking for the elixir of life and ( for the secret of how to transmute base metals into gold. They made many wonderful discov- ' eries, but neither dream materialized. They could not prevent poor h.uman beings from wearing wear-ing out, and they could not, out of the rough base materials of this world, produce gold, But the man who invented the circus either on high or low lines, we do not know which, succeeded. Who he was has never been told. We know that his work flourished in old Rome twenty-five centuries cen-turies ago, and the triumphs in the circus were so esteemed that kings and lords and nobles strove in the great arena. But the wonderful thing is that notwithstanding the new inventions, notwithstanding the new honors that have come to men, notwithstanding the picture galleries, tho moving-picture shows, the automobiles for fast driving, the airship for navigating the upper ether, not one of them can take any of the glory away from the circus. The boys and girls are just as anxious to attend a circus now as were the boys and girls of old Rome, when, if necessary, neces-sary, they would sell a slave to get the money. There is the same old elephant, the same sleepy-looking, sleepy-looking, vicious camel; there Is the royal Hon with his roar, the imperial Bengal tiger with his stripes, the leopard with his spots; there are the same acrobats; there Is the same old clown, and finest of all, the same horses with the same trappings trap-pings nothing is changed except the music from ago to age as the centuries have ebbed and flowed. We talk about tho children going to the circus. cir-cus. The old folks are just as crazy. Old toughs that have not spent a dollar except on themselves for years will go out and purchase a child or two to take to the circus, to give ther respectability and a kind of shamefaced excuse ' being there. There must be the life, the animation, the splendid splen-did horses, the expert jumpers, the ancient jokes, tho diluted lemonade, the sawdust, the animal I smell that altogether make up the charm, and it is sufficient to rob the city of all its loose change two or three or four times a year. Some people say they do not care for the circus. Some of them are too old to want to take the trouble, but most of them are liars, the proof of which is that they go all the same, and if they are garrulous they come away with a sort of a sneer, saying they saw the same thing forty years ago, and the inconsistency of all that is that they knew before they went that they were going to see it and that is what they went for. There are the wise ones who were brought up in the cities, and never had a tame colt at home to pet who will tell you that the horse is passing. They, too, are liars; he is not going to pass. He is the same, splendid fellow he was when he "pawed in the J valley" and "said among the trumpets' ha! ha!" j when Job was a boy three thousand years ago. j He is greatly abused, a great many of his kind are seen on our streets that ought to be taken out and chloroformed and their drivers ought to be j killed by torture. But that does not change the real horse. He is a drawing card, he always has s been since the first man tamed him, he always will be until the human race degenerates, and they all become prohibitionists and namby-pam-byists, and imagine that they are serving God when they say long prayers and sing hymns worse than Heber J. Grant does, and are careful never to do a good turn for their fellow-men. They are an old-fashioned crowd, too. They are the ones the New Testament tells about who" stood on the corners of the street and thanked God they were not like other men. There is another an-other fact about that which the New Testament does not state the other men are thankful they are not. What a humanizing thing a circus is! It brings all classes together. The bootblack can smile at the alderman; the domestic "who rules I the house throws off her pride and does not mind 1 sitting beside her mistress at a circus; dignified old chaps that run banks and scowl at the man who does not bring good security when he wants to borrow money, they unbend and are cordial to even newspaper reporters. And what lordly airs those reporters put on, as though they had bought their ticket, when all the world knows they did not. We think it is the horse that does it. He humanizes mankind, the horses and tho trained dogs. And what a wise look the elephants have, as much as to say, "If President Roosevelt catches any of our brothers he will have to be up in the morning." By the way, how many people know that African elephants are much smaller but have longer ears than the Asiatic elephant? There is another curiosity about the business. The boy or girl who sits like a bump on a log and never can learn his or her lesson in natural history, can tell you all about the different animals, ani-mals, where they came from, all their characteristics, character-istics, and this shows that oftentimes an object lesson Is worth more than a book to a youngster. That is why boys can learn their letters quicker off of blocks than they can out of books. If all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players, if they have their exits and their entrances, they all the same meet on common ground at a circus, and they prove every time a circus comes that the man who invented the first circus said to himself, "I cannot gain immortality im-mortality for myself, but I will make something that will be immortal, that all the children of men, no matter what be their race or condition, will rush to see, and thus they will give me honor long after I shall have been forgotten, and the world ceases to know what country I was boi In, or what my mother's name was." |