nd Mitch caught a snake, and I had my pony to
play Robbins' son, and Myrtle was goin' to be the woman who et fire.
Mitch practiced for the trapeze, and he had to practice a lot, for when
he was 4 or 5 years old, he cut his foot in two with an ax and after
that the toes were a little numb and didn't work as well as they did
before.

Mitch said that in Europe they had a royal box for queens and
princesses, so he built a kind of box for Zueline to sit in, and see the
circus, and draped it with rag carpets and put a mirror in it. It was
awful pretty.

Mitch was gate-keeper and manager. We had some bills printed by Onstott,
the printer, which said "Miller & Kirby's Renowned Circus and Menagerie"
and a lot of things, naming the performers and all that. But I must say
we had our troubles. First Kit O'Brien and his gang came down to break
up the show. He tried to come in without payin', but Mitch settled old
scores this time. He hit Kit a punch in the mouth and knocked out his
baby teeth, which were danglin' and needed to be pulled anyway. He bled
like a pig and ran up the hill hollerin', "I'll get even." But that
settled that.

Then Myrtle burned her mouth trying to chew cotton on fire, and Mitch's
toe went back on him while hangin' from the trapeze. He fell, but didn't
hurt himself much; only the audience laughed, even the princess Zueline
in the box. I rode the pony pretty well, but he was too big for the ring
in the barn, and Charley King who tried to sing "Never Take the
Horseshoe from the Door" forgot part of it, and had to back into the
corn crib which was the dressin' room.

Outside of these things, the show was a success--only this was the day
Mitch began to get acquainted with Charley King and George Heigold,
which was a bad thing, as I'll tell later.

So the circus was over and we took up the treasure again. Mitch said--we
mustn't let another thing interfere. And so we went to work at Old
Salem.

As I said, we found a lot of old foundations and we scraped and dug
around in all of 'em, mostly; and I never see so many snakes. Mitch
could take a snake by the tail and crack his head off like a whip; but I
was afraid to see him do it because there was hoop snakes around, and
their tails is pisen. Nigger Dick told me he saw one roll down hill one
time and just as it got to an oak tree, it took its tail out of its
mouth and struck the tree with the stinger of its tail. The next morning
all the leaves on the tree was