He'd cleared that twice a day for weeks some years ago, but he
wouldn't do it now. No, sir; four elephants was enough for any man to
leap over if he had a wife and child. That made a flight of thirty feet,
anyhow, from the spring-board to the ground. Oh, yes, he turned two
somersaults on the way--forward somersaults. It wasn't possible for
anybody to clear four elephants and turn backward somersaults.

I asked Artressi (his real name is Artress) about a leap with three
somersaults, and found him positive that such a feat will never become
part of a regular circus program. A man can turn the three somersaults
all right, but he loses control of himself, and doesn't know whether he
is coming down right or wrong. In fact, he is sure to come down wrong if
he does it often. Then he mentioned the one case where he himself had
made a leap with three somersaults. It was down in Kentucky, at the home
of his boyhood. Years had passed since he had seen the town, and in that
time he had risen from nothing to a blaze of circus glory. He had become
the "Great Artressi" instead of little Joe Artress, and now he was to
appear before the people who knew him.

It was perhaps the most exciting moment of his life, and as he came
down the run toward the spring-board he nerved himself to so fine an
effort that instead of doing two somersaults over the horses and
elephants, as he intended, he did three, and, by a miracle of fortune,
landed safely. That was his first and last triple; he wasn't taking
chances of a broken neck or a twisted spine, which had been the end of
more than one ambitious leaper. No, sir; he would stick to doubles,
where a man knows exactly what he's doing.

In talking with acrobats, I came upon an interesting phenomenon that
seems almost like a violation of the laws of gravitation. It appears
that the movements of a performer on the bars or trapeze are affected in
a marked degree by the slope of the ground underneath. In other words,
although bars and trapeze may rest on supports that are perfectly level,
yet the swing of an acrobat's body will be accelerated over a downward
slope or retarded over an upward slope. So true is this that the trapeze
performer swinging over an upward slope will often require all his
strength to reach a given point, while over a downward slope he must
hold back, lest he reach it too easily and suffer a collision.
Nevertheless, the swing in both cases is precisely the same, with
rigging and