d
heralded by the same servant and organ that had always attended him. It
now turned out that Monsieur Mangin had lived in the most rigid
seclusion for half a year, and that the extensively-circulated
announcements of his sudden death had been made by himself, merely as
an "advertising dodge" to bring him still more into notice, and give the
public something to talk about. I met Mangin in Paris soon after this
event.

"Aha, Monsieur Barnum!" he exclaimed, "did I not tell you I had a new
humbug that would double the sales of my pencils? I assure you my sales
are more than quadrupled, and it is sometimes impossible to have them
manufactured fast enough to supply the demand. You Yankees are very
clever, but by gar, none of you have discovered you should live all the
better if you would die for six months. It took Mangin to teach you
that."

The patronizing air with which he made this speech, slapping me at the
same time familiarly upon the back, showed him in his true character of
egotist. Although good-natured and social to a degree, he was really one
of the most self-conceited men I ever met.

Monsieur Mangin died the present year, and it is said that his heirs
received more than half a million of francs as the fruit of his
eccentric labors.

CHAPTER IV.

OLD GRIZZLY ADAMS.[37-*]

James C. Adams, or "Grizzly Adams," as he was generally termed, from the
fact of his having captured so many grizzly bears, and encountered such
fearful perils by his unexampled daring, was an extraordinary character.
For many years a hunter and trapper in the Rocky and Sierra Nevada
Mountains, he acquired a recklessness which, added to his natural
invincible courage, rendered him truly one of the most striking men of
the age. He was emphatically what the English call a man of "pluck." In
1860, he arrived in New York with his famous collection of California
animals, captured by himself, consisting of twenty or thirty immense
grizzly bears, at the head of which stood "Old Sampson"--now in the
American Museum--wolves, half a dozen other species of bear, California
lions, tigers, buffalo, elk, etc., and Old Neptune, the great sea-lion,
from the Pacific.

Old Adams had trained all these monsters so that with him they were as
docile as kittens, while many of the most ferocious among them would
attack a stranger without hesitation, if he came within their grasp. In
fact, the training of these animals was no fool's play, as Old Adams