attempt to tear the fair shoulders of Morelli only after a dozen blank cartridges had been fired in his face, was a gentleman-at-large in Dreamland. The Proprietor gave a sigh of relief as the jaguar backed into his cage from the runway, snarling and striking at the little woman who forced him backward with the whip until she was able to slam the door and make him once more a prisoner. When she passed them on her way back to the dressing-room, her dress was torn, and her eyes were flashing from the excitement of the encounter and anger at the carelessness of the carpenter who had left a board loose at the top of the den.

The table in front of the Arena.

"Of course, that might have been a serious thing for the jaguar and for my pocket book," said the Proprietor as three deep scratches in his head were being plastered up. "I couldn't afford to take any chances of an accident, and he would have been shot if he had attempted to come through a ventilator into the Arena, but a trained animal like that is worth a goodish bit of money. He let me know he was loose by giving me his love pat when I was walking through the runway, and as Morelli is the only one who can do anything with him I sent for her. She can whip considerably more than her own weight in wild-cats, and there was not the slightest danger to the audience, but not many men would have relished her task of going into that passage with the beast loose on top of the cages." He negatived the Press Agent's suggestion to make a scare-head story of the escape for the papers, and suggested that they should go up and hear Madam Morelli's account of it. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, mending a rip which the jaguar's sharp claws had made in her gown, and she shrugged her shoulders when the Stranger inquired if she had been hurt.

Two French clowns and a performing dog.

"It was nothing," she said laughing. "He jumped at me from the top of a cage when I came in, but I beat him off and whipped him back into his cage. It was only the close quarters which made it bad, for I am used to fighting them." She was interrupted by a yapping and caterwauling in the doorway, and sprang on the bed, her face white with terror, as a small terrier and the menagerie cat rolled into the room in a clawing, biting mix-up. The terrier was raising a litter of puppies in the next room, and the cat had transformed the space back of Morelli's bed into a feline nursery, and a meeting of the two anxious mothers in the hall had led to trouble. Madam Morelli always goes through her performance in an evening dress, and she stood on the bed, her long train gathered closely about her, trembling like a leaf, when the Proprietor finally separated the combatants and restored peace.

"You wouldn't think that a woman who had just come from a fight with a two hundred pound jaguar, which could easily tear her to pieces, would be scared at a scrap between a toy terrier and a mongrel cat," said the Proprietor, laughing, as he led the way to the café table. "But she makes a specialty of the larger species."

"This matter of specialties seems to run through every branch of the show business," said the Press Agent as they took their seats at the table. "I ran a dime museum in St. Louis a few years ago—in those days there was lots of money in it—and the freaks would never stand for any change in their billing. We used to have a fresh lot sent on by our New York agent every two weeks, and one Monday morning when I went down to look over the new arrivals, I knew that he had been up against the demon Rum, when he engaged such a tough looking bunch. The alleged fat woman looked as if she was wasting away with consumption, and the bearded lady had a way of absentmindedly humming the popular airs in a bass voice which gave the whole snap away. There was one likely looking girl and when I asked her what she was she told me she was the web-footed lady and showed me her feet, which had little pieces of skin growing between the toes.

"I knew that wasn't good enough, so I told her she was mistaken; that she was a Circassian beauty, and I gave her a wig and the fixings and put her on the platform. But say, would you believe it? She was so mad and embarrassed by the change in her stunt that when the lecturer was calling attention to her blond beauty, she would blush until she looked like an Indian Princess, and every time he turned his back she would take off her shoes and wiggle her toes at the audience to show what she really was.

"Things which Nature never intended them to do."

"It was up to us to get some real attraction to tide over the time until our agent should get sober and send us another bunch of freaks, so Merritt, who was my partner, and myself hunted up a big buck nigger and made a deal with him to go on as a 'Wild Man.' We ripped up a hair mattress and glued the contents onto him, and wired a couple of big tusks to his teeth, and with an iron collar around his neck and a log chain around his waist he was as good an imitation as was ever faked. We put him in a big cage which we had used the week before for a mangy old lion; one of the five hundred or so 'Wallace the Untamables' which were touring the country, and Merritt taught him to howl like a steam calliope.

"We called him 'Fuzzy Wuzzy, the Terrible Man-Eating Cannibal,' which was a waste of words, but Merritt had language to burn. He had got hold of a phony five hundred dollar bill, and when he was giving his spiel about how Fuzzy Wuzzy was captured upon a desert island, where he was found chewing a human leg, and how he couldn't eat anything but raw meat, and was always trying to get at his keeper for dessert, he would wave his phony five hundred spot over his head and give it to 'em good.

"'Five hundred dollars, ladies and gents, I will give to any man who will remain for the short space of two minutes in the cage with Fuzzy Wuzzy! Five hundred dollars to any man who is brave enough to run the risk of letting this terrible man-eating cannibal get his hinder limbs about him, for then all would be lost and Fuzzy Wuzzy would fasten his terrible fangs in his victim's throat and suck his ber-lud.'

"Well, it was a good spiel, all right, all right, and when Merritt struck that part one of the supers would prod up old Fuzzy, who would rattle his chains and howl for fair, and the audience would get cold chills down their backs. We were playing to the S. R. O., and giving so many shows a day that Merritt pretty nearly lost his voice, and Fuzzy had been prodded so much that he had to take his meals standing up. We ran 'em through pretty fast, and one afternoon Merritt was just going to give the 'All out' signal, which cleared the exhibition hall for the next performance, when up steps a big husky black roustabout from the levee and commences to strip off his coat.

"'Jes' a minit, boss,' says he. 'Ah reckon ah needs dat five hundred in mah bizness,' and Merritt looks at him in astonishment.

"'My deluded colored brother,'