I was able to say that I did remember Barnum's old museum in Broadway.
"I didn't really like it there; for the animals were smelly, you know, and the work was very confining, what with two and three performances a day. But I had to stay here in New York somehow, for my wife wa'n't able to get away. The long and short of it is, she was sick a-bed nigh on to thirty years--not suffering really all the time, of course, but puny and ailing, and getting no comfort from her food. There was times I thought she never would get well or anything. But two years ago she up and died suddenly, just when I'd most got used to her being sick. Women's dreadful uncertain, ain't they?"
I had to confess that the course of the female of our species was more or less incalculable.
"My daughter, she died the year before her mother; and she'd never been sick a day in her life--took after me, she did," Professor Briggs went on. "She and her husband used to do Yankee Girl and Irish Boy duets in the vaudevilles, as they call them now."
I remarked that variety show, the old name for entertainments of that type, seemed to me more appropriate.
"That's what I think myself," he returned, "and that's what I'm always telling them. But they say vaudeville is more up to date--and that's what they want now, everything up to date. Now I think there's lots of the old-fashioned things that's heaps better than some of these new-fangled things they're so proud of. Take a three-ringed circus, for instance--what good is a three-ringed circus to anybody, except the boss of it? The public has only two eyes apiece, that's all--and even a man who squints can't see more than two rings at once, can he? And three rings don't give a real artist a show; they discourage him by distracting folk's attention away from him. How is he to do his best if he can't never be certain sure that the public is looking at him?"
Here again I was able to express my full agreement with the professor.
"I'd never do in a three-ring show, no matter what they was to give me," he continued. "And I've got an act nearly ready now that there's lots of these shows will be wanting just as soon as they hear of it. I"--here he interrupted himself and looked up and down the street, as though to make sure that there were no concealed listeners lying in wait to overhear what he was about to say--"I don't mind telling you about it, if you'd like to know."