Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 26, 2025
"Monday night I drop around. Mame is at the Unparalleled Exhibition with Thomas. "'Now, may the curse of the forty-one seven-sided sea cooks, says I, 'and the bad luck of the nine impenitent grasshoppers rest upon this self-same sideshow at once and forever more. Amen. I'll go to see it myself to-morrow night and investigate its baleful charm.
He poured out rivers of ridicule upon them, and forced the big mass meeting to laugh and applaud. He scoffed at them as adventurers, mountebanks, sideshow riffraff, dime museum freaks; he assailed their showy titles with measureless derision; he said they were back-alley barbers disguised as nobilities, peanut peddlers masquerading as gentlemen, organ-grinders bereft of their brother monkey.
I then learned also that England, while she was fighting with us, had her hands full fighting Bonaparte, that her war with us was a sideshow, and that this was uncommonly lucky for us as lucky quite as those ships from France under Admiral de Grasse, without whose help Washington could never have caught Cornwallis and compelled his surrender at Yorktown, October 19, 1781.
As if by magic it has disappeared, and with it the sideshow and its banners, the Punch and Judy show, the horse tent, the cook tent, the blacksmith shop.
No matter what language the natives of each port might speak, they never failed to understand and appreciate these little sideshow comedies of Grandpa's. And when it would become noised about among them that this particular monkey had traveled all the way from South America through the air with the "bird-men," their awe for him was amusing to behold.
"And a Christian ceremony," he insisted; "parson, robes, prayer-book regular thing no sideshow performance, eh?" "Of course," said she, "what do you think? Do you suppose that just because I see things in an original way, I don't know what's proper?
I'll leave it to Cap'n Sproul, here, if I ain't tried to put a little kindness and human feelin' into runnin' this place, and " Hiram was untying the last knot. "Spit out what you're drivin' at," he cried bluntly; "this ain't no time for sideshow barkin'. The big show is about to begin." "I want to invite in the boys," blurted Wixon.
He might have added more but Lawrence appeared just then and, imitating a barker in a sideshow, announced that everything was ready for the performance. The entertainment proved a brilliant success. Edestone showed some scenes from America which he had brought over to amuse the distinguished audiences he had expected to meet in Europe.
It spread to the throng of crooks, pickpockets and fakirs that followed the show; it reached to the freaks in the sideshow. And not one among them all would have betrayed him by sign or deed. They stuck together like leeches, these good and bad nomads, and they asked few questions. And so it was that David Jenison made his first appearance as a clown in the sawdust ring.
'Twould be too much like a Merry Andrew's or a Buffoon's sideshow, where the freaks of all sorts are gathered, such as they have at those county fairs, which the mortals get up, to which are gathered great crowds. The charge of admission is a sixpence. I vote 'no."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking