an Tackled Pa.]

Pa got up to murder the man that choked him, when the ostrich reached
its head out between the bars of the cage and picked pa's big diamond
stud off his shirt, big as a piece of rock candy, and swallowed it, and
pa said that's the limit, and he called the manager and asked him how he
was going to get his diamond stud out of the ostrich. The manager told
pa to go to the dressing-room and ask the woman who has charge of the
wardrobe for the ostrich stomach pump, and when he got the stomach pump
the manager said the ostrich would cough up the diamond stud. Pa went
off to the dressing-room to get the ostrich stomach pump, and I knew
there was going to be trouble, 'cause I thought the manager was just
stringing pa.

Well, he went up to the woman in the dressing-room, and said he came
after her stomach pump, ostrich size, and you'd a died to see the
ruction. The woman looked at pa as though he had escaped from a
sanitarium, and then she seemed to think he was trying to make game of
her, and she said: "You old skate, do you know who you have the honor of
addressing? I am the queen of this realm, and they all kow-tow to me;
now you come and take your medicine," and before pa could say boo she
had pulled a big clothes bag over his head and tied it around his feet,
and said: "Come on, girls, we are going to have roasted missionary," and
they were lighting a gasoline torch to roast pa, when the owner of the
show came along and asked what was up. When the wardrobe woman told him
pa had insulted her, the owner gave her $10 to buy champagne for the
performers, and she released pa, and he went back to choke his diamond
out of the ostrich.

Pa says this life is more exciting, if anything, than staying at home,
and it will either kill him or cure him of a desire to be a Barnum in
about a month more.

CHAPTER VII.

The Circus Has a Yellow Fever Scare--The Bad Boy and His Dad Dress
Up as Hottentots--Pa Takes a Mustard Bath and Attends a Revival
Meeting.

Well, we have had a row for your life, and all the excitement anybody
can stand. We got into Indiana and have had a yellow fever scare, a
quarantine that lasted one night, so nobody could sleep on our train, a
riot at Evansville 'cause we took on a couple of female trapeze women
that came from Honduras, via New Orleans, and a revival of religion, all
in one bunch, and pa is beginning to get haggard, like a hag.

The female trapeze performers,