obody took the
papers, and the people were not on to me. Pa says as long as your
conscience is clear, and your pores open, life is one glad, sweet song.
Well, I don't know, but if pa's conscience is clear, he must have
strained it the way they do rain water, to get the wigglers out, or
else he has used an egg to settle his conscience, the way they settle
coffee. If his pores are open, he has opened them in the old way, with
a corkscrew. But, with all I have had to contend with in the way of a
frightful example from pa, I am not so worse.

How many boys of my age, do you suppose, could put in a season with a
circus and have all the facilities I have had to go wrong, and come out
as well as I have? The way the freaks just doted on me would have turned
the heads of most boys, but when I found out that all of them, from the
fat woman and the bearded woman, to the trapeze performers, ate onions
three times a day, I said: "Nay, nay, Hennery will camp with the
animals, whose smell is natural, and not acquired."

Say, do you know I have saved hundred of boys this summer from ruin,
'cause in every town there are lots of boys who want to run away from
home and go off with a circus, and 'cause I belonged to the show they
all came to me, and pa appointed me to discourage the boys, and drive
them away from the show. I know in Virginia all the boys wanted to run
away, and but for me the state wouldn't have boys enough to grow up and
shoot the negroes. But when I found boys who wanted to skip away from
home, I would give them a job, and they would have slept in the straw
with the horses, and eaten at the second table after the negroes had
been fed, if they could only shake their comfortable homes and loving
friends and join a traveling circus.

Well, I always gave such boys a job watering the camels, and after they
had carried water from daylight till dark, and had seen it disappear
down a camel, and the camels grumbling because they didn't bring water
faster, the boys would ask me how long it look to fill up a camel,
anyway. I would tell them that if they kept right at work, the camels
ought to be filled up full along in the fall. The boys would reluctantly
resign. Our camels have been the making of hundreds of boys by their
tank-like capacity to hold water. One boy at Richmond, Va., got it on me
by getting a section of fire hose and hitching it to a hydrant, and
letting the water run into a trough at the camel stand in the menager