Apropos of Barnum, once in my life I gave myself up to unmitigated joy. Weary of lecturing, singing the song "I would I were a boy again," I went to see the elephant. To speak truly, I saw not one elephant, but half a dozen. I had a feast of roaring and a flow of circus. In fact I indulged in the wildest dissipation. I visited Barnum's circus and sucked peppermint candy in a way most childlike and bland. The reason seems obscure, but circuses and peppermint candy are as inseparable as peanuts and the Bowery. Appreciating this solemn fact, Barnum provides bigger sticks adorned with bigger red stripes than ever Romans sucked in the palmy days of the Coliseum. In the dim distance I mistook them for barbers' poles, but upon direct application I recognized them for my long lost own. However, let me, like the Germans, begin with the creation. "Here, ladies and gentlemen, is for sale Mr. Barnum's Autobiography, full of interest and anecdote, one of the most charming productions ever issued from the press, 900 pages, thirty-two full-page engravings, reduced from $3.50 to $1.50. Every purchaser enters free." How ordinary mortals can resist buying Barnum's Autobiography for one dollar--such a bargain as never was--is incomprehensible. I believe they can not. I believe they do their duty like men. As one man I resisted, because I belong to the press, and therefore am not mortal. Who ever heard of a journalist getting a bargain? With Spartan firmness I turned a deaf ear to the persuasive music of the propagandist, and entered where hope is all before. I was not staggered by a welcome from all the Presidents of the United States, Fitz-Greene Halleck, General Hooker, and Gratz Brown. These personages are rather woodeny and red about the face, as though flushed with victories of the platform or the table, but I recognize their fitness in a menagerie. What athlete has turned more somersaults than some of these representative men? What lion has roared more gently than a few of these sucking doves? Barnum's tact in appropriately grouping curiosities, living and dead, is too well known to require comment. Passing what Sam Weller would call "a reg'lar knock-down of intellect," I took my seat high in the air amid a dense throng of my fellow-creatures, and realized how many people it takes to make up the world. What did I see? I saw double. I beheld not one ring but two, in each of which the uncommon variety of man was disporting in an entertaining manner. I felt for these uncommon men. Think what immortal hates must arise from these dual performances! We all like to receive the reward of merit, but when two performances are going on simultaneously, how are the artists to know for whom it is intended? Applause is the sweet compensation for which all strive privately or publicly, and to be cheated out of it, or left in doubt as to its destination, is a refined form of the Inquisition. Fancy the sensations