rrel the elephants had been performing on and got the
attention of the audience and told them not to be unreasonable. He said
the management had found by experience that after the ourang outang had
been trained to eat like a man and wear men's clothes, that his tail was
in the way, so at a great expense the management had caused Dennis' tail
to be amputated at a New York hospital, and while we always carry the
tail along, it was only used when a critical audience demanded it, but
if this refined audience so desired the tail would be attached to the
intelligent animal.

The crowd yelled: "Pin on the tail; the tail goes with the hide," and
the trainer began to pin it on. Say, I could have killed that trainer.
He run that safety pin about an inch into my spine, and I jumped into
the air about four feet, and I was going to use a cuss word that I
learned in Philadelphia, but I had presence of mind enough to grunt just
as Dennis used to, and chatter like a monkey, and the day was saved. The
tail was on and I turned my back to show that it was on straight, like a
woman's hat, when pa said to hurry the performance to a conclusion,
because he could see that there was a spirit of unrest in the audience,
and he would not be surprised any moment to see Virginia secede and go
out of the union.

There was nothing more for me to do except to drink my cup of
after-dinner coffee, and smoke my cigarette, and quit, and I was patting
myself on the back at my success and squirming around in the chair,
'cause the pin in my tail hurt my back but I never said a word. The
attendant brought in the coffee and I took a couple of swallows, when I
realized that somebody had put cayenne pepper into it, and I was hot
under the collar, but though I was burning up inside, I never peeped,
but just choked and took a swallow of water and vowed to kill the person
that made the coffee.

I kept my temper till the trainer handed me the cigarette and a match,
and the first puff I realized that they had filled the cigarette with
snuff, and after blowing out the smoke I began to sneeze, and the
audience fairly went wild. I sneezed about eight times, and at every
sneeze the pin in my spine hurt like thunder, but I never lost my
temper, till about the seventh sneeze, when my monkey mask flew off, and
then a boy about my size, right in front of me, yelled: "It ain't a
monkey at all, it is a little nigger," and he threw a ripe persimmon and
hit me right in the eye