le in the dressing-room with a gauze screen so the
audiences can see us cut off legs like they do in a hospital. Maybe we
shall put in a dissecting room if the people seem to demand it.

CHAPTER VI.

The Bad Boy Puts Fly-Paper in the Bob Cat's Cage--The Bob Cat Causes
a Panic in the Main Tent--The Midget Quarrels with the Giant--Pa is
Almost Arrested for Kidnaping and the Ostrich Swallows His Diamond
Stud.

May 14.--This has been a week that would kill anybody, and pa and I talk
of resigning, though pa feels as though he didn't want to break up the
show by going away right in the middle of the harvesting of shekels from
the country men, and I don't know what would happen if pa and I should
both be taken sick at the same time.

The boss of the menagerie got a new animal by express from Colorado when
we were leaving Akron, O., and we got it in one end of a cage occupied
by a happy family of rabbits, coons, a spotted leopard and a hound dog
and a house cat. The new animal was a bob cat, such as Roosevelt shoots
when the man has the camera ready to catch him in the act. Say, but that
bob cat is a terror, and crosser than any animal we got, except the
hyenas. The bob cat just walked around and snarled and spit at the happy
family through the bars, and kept them awake all night on the road, and
the happy family held a sort of convention and I could see by the way
they all looked at me that they were passing resolutions inviting me to
break up the bob cat business. The manager of the menagerie told pa he
wished the confounded bob cat would escape, 'cause he was a blooming
nuisance, so I thought I would help get rid of the beast, and save the
show from disgrace. So when we got to Oberlin I thought that was a pious
community that could stand a wild bob cat, so I put several sheets of
sticky tanglefoot fly paper in the bob cat's cage and opened the door of
the cage, after the crowd had gone into the main tent to the big show,
and the menagerie tent was empty except the keepers. They were all
asleep under the wagons, and the animals had all curled down for a nap,
and the freaks were on their platform lolling around, waiting for the
main show to be out so they could do their stunts over again.

The bob cat got all his four feet in the tanglefoot fly paper, then he
grabbed a sheet in his mouth and rolled over in a few more sheets, and
when he was entirely harmless and you couldn't tell what he was, I
ope