That is the reason I shuddered a little when I felt a man's hand in my
pocket. It was so unexpected, and the surroundings were such that I must
have appeared startled. The man was a stranger to me, though I could see
that he was a perfect gentleman. His clothes were superior to mine in
every way, and he had a certain refinement of manners which betrayed his
ill-concealed Knickerbocker lineage high.
I said, “Sir, you will find my fine cut tobacco in the other pocket.” This
startled him so that he wheeled about and wildly dashed into the arms of a
wax policeman near the door. When he discovered that he was in the
clutches of a suit of second-hand clothes filled with wax, he seemed to be
greatly annoyed and strode rapidly away.
I returned to view a chaste and truthful scene where one man had
successfully killed another with a club. I leaned pensively against a
column with my own spinal column, wrapped in thought.
Pretty soon a young gentleman from New Jersey with an Adam's apple on him
like a full-grown yam, and accompanied by a young lady also from the
mosquito jungles of Jersey, touched me on the bosom with his umbrella and
began to explain me to his companion.
[Illustration: THIS IS JESSE JAMES.]
“This,” said the Adam's apple with the young man attached to it, “is Jesse
James, the great outlaw chief from Missouri. How life-like he is. Little
would you think, Emeline, that he would as soon disembowel a bank, kill the
entire board of directors of a railroad company and ride off the rolling
stock, as you would wrap yourself around a doughnut. How tender and kind
he looks. He not only looks gentle and peaceful, but he looks to me as if
he wasn't real bright.”
I then uttered a piercing shriek and the young man from New Jersey went
away. Nothing is so embarrassing to an eminent man as to stand quietly
near and hear people discuss him.
But it is remarkable to see people get fooled at a wax show. Every day a
wax figure is taken for a live man, and live people are mistaken for wax.
I took hold of a waxen hand in one corner of the winter garden to see if
the ring was a real diamond, and it flew up and took me across the ear in
such a life-like manner that my ear is still hot and there is a roaring in
my head that sounds very disagreeable, indeed.
The Bite of a Mad Dog.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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