It was Bailey’s custom often to do things first and then consult Barnum, or rather, tell him what had been done, so that in his last years Barnum’s function at the circus was as a huge advertisement. Whenever his carriage entered the arena at Madison Square Garden, he received an ovation from the audience. The old man, whose curly white hair surrounded a shiny bald dome, smiled complacently at the adults, and sometimes stopped to shake the hands of the children and to ask them if they were having a good time. “To me there is no picture so beautiful,” wrote Barnum in his old age, “as ten thousand smiling, bright-eyed, happy children; no music so sweet as their clear-ringing laughter. That I have had power, year after year, by providing innocent amusement for the little ones, to create such pictures, to evoke such music, is my proudest and happiest reflection.” One day in 1888 Bailey called Barnum to Madison Square Garden and announced to him that the circus was going to England. “That’ll cost a lot of money,” Barnum protested, but Bailey insisted that it would make more. The circus went to England; and the achievement of its transportation alone was worth much in advertising value. In 1889 the show opened at the Olympia in London, and Barnum, of course, was present. He and the show were each received with tremendous enthusiasm by both the élite and the populace. Barnum was accepted in London as the jolly, veteran showman. A banquet was held in his honor at the Victoria Hotel, where more than two hundred politicians, noblemen and writers, with the Earl of Kilmorey as chairman and George Augustus Sala as toastmaster, paid honor to the personality whom they regarded as America’s most representative man. At the show he was greeted with due homage. Every afternoon and evening Barnum’s open carriage drove up to the entrance to the arena, drawn by two fine horses, driven by a coachman and adorned with a footman in luxurious livery. The performance stopped immediately, and there was a feeling silence as the old man, tall and portly, but slightly bent with age, dressed in a frock coat, a turn-down collar and a shirt with an extraordinary number of ruffles and a big diamond stud in its center, drove around the enormous arena. At intervals in his progress he would stop the carriage, rise, remove his shining top hat and call out in his squeaky, decaying voice, with its sharp Yankee accent: “I suppose you all come to see Barnum. Wa-al, I’m Barnum.” Then he would make a deep bow, and the carriage would proceed a little further, when the same interesting demonstration would occur, until the circuit of the huge arena was accomplished; the men removed their hats and the ladies waved handkerchiefs to the ambassador of vast entertainment. In explaining this daily incident to a reporter, after he had returned home, Barnum said, “I felt that Barnum’s show with Barnum left out would be as bad as Hamlet minus the famous Dane.”