im than even
the main chance. He was a genius like Rabelais, but one who employed
business and humanity for material instead of literature, just as Abraham
Lincoln, who was a brother of the same band, employed patriotism and
politics. All three of them expressed vast problems, financial,
intellectual, or natural, by the brief arithmetic of a joke. Mr. Barnum
was fearfully busy in those days; what with buying elephants, wooing two-
headed girls for his Grand Combination, laying out towns, chartering
banks, and inventing unheard-of wonders for the unrivalled collection of
one hundred and fifty million unparalleled moral marvels; but he always
found time to act as unpaid contributor to a column of humorous items
which I always published. I have said that I had no assistant; I forgot
that I always had Mr. Barnum as assistant humorous editor for that
department. All at once, when least expected, he would come smiling in
with some curiosity of literature such as the "reverse"--

"Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel,"

or a fresh conundrum or joke, with all his heart and soul full of it, and
he would be as delighted over the proof as if to see himself in print was
a startling novelty. We two had "beautiful times" over that column, for
there was a great deal of "boy" still left in Barnum; nor was I by any
means deficient in it. One thing I set my face against firmly: I never
would in any way whatever write up, aid, or advertise the great show or
museum, or cry up the elephant. I was resolved to leave the paper first.

On that humorous column Barnum always deferred to me, even as a small
school-boy defers to an elder on the question of a game of marbles or hop-
scotch. There was no affectation or play in it; we were both quite in
earnest. I think I see him now, coming smiling in like a harvest-moon,
big with some new joke, and then we sat down at the desk and "edited."
How we would sit and mutually and admiringly read to one another our
beautiful "good things," the world forgetting, by the world forgot! And
yet I declare that never till this instant did the great joke of it all
ever occur to me--that two men of our experiences could be so simply
pleased! Those humorous columns, collected and republished in a book,
might truly bear on the title-page, "By Barnum and Hans Breitmann." And
we were both of the opinion that it really would make a very nice book
indeed. We were indeed both "boys" over it at play.

The