Peck's Bad Boy with the CircusPeck, George W. (George Wilbur)
General
Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus
Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
Boys -- Juvenile fiction; Circus -- Juvenile fiction
By that time the cage of hyenas began to sneeze a quartette, and fight
each other, and the atmosphere about their cage was full of hair and
language that would be much like cussing if it could be translated into
English. Pa tried to quiet the crowd and silence the hyenas by taking an
iron bar and mauling them, but the hyenas just backed up against the
rear of the cage and howled and sneezed at pa, and dared him to come on.
[Illustration: The Lion Sneezed and Blew Pa Clear Across the Tent.]
One of them caught him by the shirt sleeve and tore pa's shirt off and
eat it. Pa was a sight, with no shirt on, and he ought to have gone to
the dressing room and slicked, but just then the camels and the
giraffes, who had inhaled their snuff, began to sneeze and beg to be
killed, and pa had to go over there and quiet them. A camel is the
solemnist looking beast on earth when he tries to be good natured, but
when he is sick and mad, and full of snuff, he is a fiend. One such
camel is enough for a man to handle, but when 14 camels are all sneezing
at once, and trying to locate the person that is responsible for their
trouble, it is the safest to keep away, and when pa went in amongst
them, with no shirt on, and the Arab keepers had run away in fright, it
was a dangerous thing to do.
But pa is brave even to rashness. He went up to Mahomet, the
double-humped leader of the herd, who was the leader of the sneezers,
and kicked him in the slats and told him to hush up his noise. He
clubbed him on the humps with a tent stake. Then there was a rebellion
in Egypt, and Mahomet bit pa, and wouldn't let go, and the other camels
sneezed all over pa, and had him down, walking on him with their padded
feet. The circus hands had to pull pa out, and it wasn't so bad, because
the crowd remained and they thought it was a part of the show, and that
the animals were trained to sneeze that way.
The worst case was the hippopotamus. He was so big, and had such big
nostrils, that I laid about half a pound of snuff on the side of his
tank, and when he snuffed it up his nose he got it all. I heard a howl
from the tank and the herd, who was the leader of the sneezers, and I
told pa to come on, 'cause Vessuvious was going to erupt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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