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Show EAGER TO SEE ELEPHANT First One That Was Brought to the United States Aroused the Utmost Ut-most Curiosity. Nowadays, when summer in the United States would hardly seem itself without the coming of a circus, it is difficult to realize the excitement aroused by the first exhibition of an elephant. A now-forgotten showman, Hackaliah Bailey, is said to have imported im-ported the first elephant nearly a hundred hun-dred years ago, and the animal was a whole show in himself. The circus tent had not yet come into being, and the elephant was shown in barns in the Eastern states that then held the bulk of the population. To prevent the public from seeing the show without charge, the elephant traveled from place to place in the night; but even so, the public refused to be wholly circumvented, cir-cumvented, and small companies gathered gath-ered with bonfires ready to light when the strange creature came lumbering past on his way to the next town. Sometimes, however, the management defeated this intention by sending along the road a horse built up to look like an elephant in the dark, and when the bonfire had been lighted and had burned out, the real elephant followed. Christian Monitor. |