razor, and, as if by accident, it flew from his hand into the water. All the other passengers created a sensation with their half-shaved faces when they arrived in New York on Sunday afternoon. Barnum himself never ceased to delight in this type of joke. Barnum’s father soon despaired of ever being able to make his son useful on the farm, and Barnum admitted that he “generally contrived to shirk the work altogether, or, by slighting it, get through with the day’s work.” His father opened a country store in Bethel and made Phineas the clerk. Here he drove sharp bargains with old women who paid for their purchases in butter, eggs, beeswax, feathers, and rags. The atmosphere of the country store exercised an important influence on Barnum’s later career. On wet days there was no business, and then, he tells us, “from six to twenty social, jolly, story-telling, joke-playing wags and wits, regular originals, would get together at the tavern or store, and spend their evenings or stormy afternoons in relating anecdotes, describing their adventures, playing off practical jokes upon each other, and engaging in every project out of which a little fun could be extracted by village wits whose ideas were usually sharpened at brief intervals by a ‘treat,’ otherwise known as a glass of Santa Cruz rum, old Holland gin, or Jamaica spirits.” Practical jokes of a crude nature, the product of brains whose sole aim was to get the better of the other fellow somehow, were a great source of amusement and one of the few sources of instruction of young Phineas. These Connecticut Yankees must have made this Connecticut Yankee realize that if he was to survive in this world, he must be sharp and not too scrupulous, except on Sunday. His own grandfather played what Barnum called a practical joke, and which we might be inclined to call something more, on the boy the day he was born. It has been mentioned that Barnum inherited a tract of land called “Ivy Island” from Phineas Taylor in consideration of taking the name Phineas through life. His grandfather never spoke of the boy in the presence of strangers without saying that he was the richest boy in town because he owned “Ivy Island.” For about six years these allusions to “Ivy Island” continued, and finally, when he was twelve years old, permission was granted him to visit the property which was deeded in his name. The property consisted of bogs, snakes, hornets, and stunted ivies, mostly under water. When he asked for an explanation, Phineas was told that it could not be an island unless it was literally surrounded by water, and that it could not be “Ivy Island” unless its main product was stunted ivies. We shall see how Barnum used “Ivy Island” to advantage, but at the time it was a profound disappointment, and the incident must have influenced his impression of the ways of the world.