Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. BarnumBarnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
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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
One night, while giving a concert in Boston, a girl approached the
ticket-office, and laying down $3 for a ticket, remarked, “There goes
half a month’s earnings, but I am determined to hear Jenny Lind.” Miss
Lind’s secretary heard the remark, and a few minutes afterwards coming
into her room, he laughingly related the circumstance. “Would you know
the girl again?” asked Jenny, with an earnest look. Upon receiving an
affirmative reply, she instantly placed a $20 gold-piece in his hand,
and said, “Poor girl! give her that with my best compliments.” He at
once found the girl, who cried with joy when she received the
gold-piece, and heard the kind words with which the gift was
accompanied.
The night after Jenny’s arrival in Boston, a display of fireworks was
given in her honor, in front of the Revere House, after which followed a
beautiful torchlight procession by the Germans of that city.
On her return from Boston to New York, Jenny, her companion, and Messrs.
Benedict and Belletti, stopped at Iranistan, my residence in Bridgeport,
where they remained until the following day. The morning after her
arrival, she took my arm and proposed a promenade through the grounds.
She seemed much pleased, and said, “I am astonished that you should have
left such a beautiful place for the sake of travelling through the
country with me.”
The same day she told me in a playful mood, that she had heard a most
extraordinary report. “I have heard that you and I are about to be
married,” said she; “now how could such an absurd report ever have
originated?”
“Probably from the fact that we are ‘engaged,’” I replied. She enjoyed a
joke, and laughed heartily.
“Do you know, Mr. Barnum,” said she, “that if you had not built
Iranistan, I should never have come to America for you?”
I expressed my surprise, and asked her to explain.
“I had received several applications to visit the United States,” she
continued, “but I did not much like the appearance of the applicants,
nor did I relish the idea of crossing 3,000 miles of ocean; so I
declined them all. But the first letter which Mr. Wilton, your agent,
addressed me, was written upon a sheet headed with a beautiful engraving
of Iranistan. It attracted my attention. I said to myself, a gentleman
who has been so successful in his business as to be able to build and
reside in such a palace cannot be a mere ‘adventurer.’ So I wrote to
your agent, and consented to an interview, which I should have declined,
if I had not seen the picture of Iranistan!”
“That, then, fully pays me for building it,” I replied; “for I intend
and expect to make more by this musical enterprise than Iranistan cost
me.”
“I really hope so,” she replied; “but you must not be too sanguine, you
know, ‘man proposes but God disposes.’”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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