ht the head of the cobra close to his face, his expression became
fixed and stern and the pupils of his widely opened eyes, which had been
dilated until the iris was but a narrow rim, contracted to the size of
pin heads. The cobra gazed at him fixedly and the tense body slowly
uncoiled from his arm and hung limp and motionless, and Brandu laid it
on the floor as lifeless and inert as a piece of rope. One of his
assistants handed him a glass containing a couple of raw eggs and,
handling it as carelessly as if it were a harmless garter snake, he
picked up the cobra and forced a tube of polished bamboo between its
jaws. When he had poured the eggs through the tube he withdrew it and
carefully replaced the snake in the basket, still apparently lifeless;
but bending over he blew sharply into its face and the cobra was
instantly reanimated into five feet of viciousness. Its head reared up
above the edge, the spectacled hood distended in anger, but Brandu
quickly clapped on the cover and the snake feeding was finished for two
weeks.

[Illustration: _"You're a blame fine figure of a fat man."_]

"That is a great performance of Brandu's," said the Press Agent, "but it
profits us nothing because the best part of it cannot be shown to the
public. I never see a snake fed without thinking of something which
happened when I was running a side show with the Greatest Show on Earth.

"You know that the dime museum business was run to death while the craze
lasted in this country, and freaks got so common that you couldn't throw
a stone in the streets of any large city without hitting one of 'em.
When the fickle public tired of giving up its dimes to see 'em, a guy
named Merritt and myself had a choice collection on hand, and we went on
the road with the big show for the summer, thinking perhaps our business
would pick up in the fall. Our two great attractions were the biggest
boa-constrictor in captivity, which we called 'Jointless Jake,' and the
heaviest fat man in the world. That snake was about two hundred feet
long, and while the fat man wasn't much on length, he held the record
for belt measurement. Nine hundred and twenty-seven pounds he weighed,
as we demonstrated on our own scales at every performance. Their feed
bill was quite an item, as the snake took a half-dozen sheep every two
weeks and the fat man, who was billed as 'Signor Adipose
Avoirdupois'--Merritt invented that--needed about a side of beef every
day.

"Freaks are