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Updated: June 3, 2025
I got some of Cross's employees to swear that they had seen the elephant being painted in Liverpool, and Forepaugh replied by getting a commission of scientific sharps from Ann Arbor to examine the beast and swear that the color was natural.
"I couldn't be a clown," began David in consternation. "Sure you can," interrupted the boss. "It's as easy as fallin' off a log. Joey can tell you all the tricks. He's the best in the world, Joey Grinaldi is. That's what I've got him for. We've got the best show in the world, too. Barnum ain't in the same class with us. Forepaugh and Van Amberg?
There was intense rivalry between the two big shows, the P. T. Barnum and the Forepaugh aggregations, and the bitter feeling between the proprietors was transmitted to the employees. The advance agents would steal each other's printed matter and posters out of the express offices, and you could always count on a fight between the canvas men whenever the two shows were close enough together.
When we asked one of the members of this club why the club made such a fuss over the circus, he looked very much astonished; and he answered, "Well, why not? Old Forepaugh is worth over a million dollars, and he always sends us complimentaries whenever he comes to town!" We asked this same gentleman if he had read the new edition of Sappho's poems.
And up rose the table, with the litter of coffee cups, cigars, and cognac, up rose the two chairs, one at either end with Sinnett and Forepaugh sitting on them, and away they floated out of the open window it was a June afternoon and along Bond Street, above the carriages and the hansoms and omnibuses and the people as far as Piccadilly, and round the lamp post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window.
The one which we had bleached would only keep white for about two weeks, and as each treatment cost seven hundred dollars Barnum called me off. The Forepaugh bunch was trying to poison it, and as the whole thing was dead as a money-making venture and white elephants a drug in the market, we let this one regain its natural color.
"Hold on," said Sinnett, and "I never held on to anything as tight in my life as I did to that table," said Forepaugh in conclusion. He always reminded me of the man who so annoyed my Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or bigger than anybody else.
"Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant in my back yard," my Uncle used to say, "he would at once invite me to see the mastodon in his." Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for everybody else's elephant. If Forepaugh gave us a great deal of information we had no possible use for and talked us to despair, he was really a good fellow whom we should have missed from our table.
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