Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. BarnumBarnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
General
Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum
Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891; Circus owners -- United States -- Biography
While I was at Aberdeen, in Scotland, I met Anderson, the “Wizard of the
North.” I had known him for a long time, and we were on familiar terms.
The General’s exhibitions were to close on Saturday night, and Anderson
was to open in the same hall on Monday evening. He came to our
exhibition, and at the close we went to the hotel together to get a
little supper. After supper we were having some fun and jokes together,
when it occurred to Anderson to introduce me to several persons who were
sitting in the room, as the “Wizard of the North,” at the same time
asking me about my tricks and my forthcoming exhibition. He kept this up
so persistently that some of our friends who were present, declared that
Anderson was “too much for me,” and, meanwhile, fresh introductions to
strangers who came in, had made me pretty generally known in that
circle as the “Wizard of the North,” who was to astonish the town in the
following week. I accepted the situation at last, and said:
“Well, gentlemen, as I perform here for the first time, on Monday
evening, I like to be liberal, and I should be very happy to give orders
of admission to those of you who will attend my exhibition.”
The applications for orders were quite general, and I had written thirty
or forty, when Anderson, who saw that I was in a fair way of filling his
house with “dead-heads,” cried out--
“Hold on! I am the ‘Wizard of the North.’ I’ll stand the orders already
given, but not another one.”
Our friends, including the “Wizard” himself, began to think that I had
rather the best of the joke.
During our three years’ stay abroad, I made a second hasty visit to
America, leaving the General in England in the hands of my agents. I
took passage from Liverpool on board a Cunard steamer, commanded by
Captain Judkins. One of my fellow passengers was the celebrated divine,
Robert Baird. I had known him as the author of an octavo volume,
“Religion in America”; and while that work had impressed me as
exhibiting great ability and an outspoken honesty of purpose, it had
also given me the notion that its author must be very rigid and
intolerant as a sectarian. Still I was happy to make his acquaintance on
board the steamship, and soon regarded with favor the venerable
Presbyterian divine.
Dr. Baird had been for some time a missionary in Sweden. He was now
paying a visit to his native land. I found him a shrewd, well-informed
Christian gentleman, and I took much pleasure in hearing him converse.
One night it was storming furiously. The waves, rolling high, afforded a
sight of awful grandeur, to witness which I was tempted to put on a
pea-jacket, go upon the deck, and lash myself to the side of the ship.
After I had been there nearly an hour, wrapt in meditation and wonder,
not unmixed with awe, Dr. Baird came up in the darkness, feeling his way
cautiously along the deck. As he came where I was, I hailed him; and he
asked what I was doing so long up there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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