f the
profession over here on East Eleventh Street, and Emily had been in a
livery barn down in Greenwich Village, just naturally eating her old
India-rubber head off. Windy, having run low as to coin, wasn't able to
pay up Emily's back board, and the liveryman was holding her for the
bill.

"So, hearing some way that I'm fairly well upholstered with currency, he
comes to me and suggests that if I'll dig up what's necessary to get
Emily out of hock, he can snare a line of bookings in vaudeville, and
we'll all three go out on the two-a-day together, him as trainer and me
as manager and Emily as the principal attraction. The proceeds is to be
cut up fifty-fifty as between me and him.

"The notion don't sound like such a bad one. That was back in the days
when refined vaudeville was running very strongly to trained-animal acts
and leading ladies that had quit leading but hadn't found out about it
yet. Nowadays them ex-queens of tragedy can go into the movies and draw
down so much money that if they only get half as much as they say
they're getting, they're getting almost twice as much as anybody would
give 'em; but them times, vaudeville was their one best bet. And next to
emotional actrines who could emosh twicet daily for twenty minutes on a
stretch, without giving way anywhere, a good trained-animal turn had the
call. It might be a troupe of educated Potomac shad or an educated ape
or a city-broke Gila monster or a talking horse or what not. In our case
'twas Emily, the bull.

"First thing, we goes down to the livery-stable where Emily is spending
the Indian summer and consuming half her weight in dry provender every
twenty-four hours. The proprietor of this here fodder-emporium is named
McGuire, and when I tells him I'm there to settle Emily's account in
full, he carries on as though entirely overcome by joyfulness--not that
he's got any grudge against Emily, understand, but for other good and
abundant sufficiencies. He states that so far as Emily's personal
conduct is concerned, during her enforced sojourn in his midst, she's
always deported herself like a perfect lady. But she takes up an awful
lot of room, and one of the hands is now on the verge of nervous
prostration from overexertions incurred in packing hay to her, and, it
seems she's addicted to nightmares. She gets to dreaming that a mouse
nearly an inch and a half long is after her,--all bulls is terrible
afraid, you know, that some day a mouse is going to