He kept on sneezing, and looking so astounded, as though he couldn’t make out what had got into him.  Pa heard the commotion and came running up to the cage to find out what ailed the lion.  After I had gone around to the other cages and put snuff in all of them, I came up to the lion’s cage.  The lion had stopped sneezing and was roaring and jumping up and down, with his mouth open, trying to catch his breath, like a man who has taken too big a dose of fresh horse-radish.

Pa said:  “What have you been doing to Shadrack?”

I told pa I had woke Shadrack up, and that in about a minute he would find that the whole animal kingdom had got a bellyful, and would join in the chorus.

Pa tried to soothe the lion by going up to the cage and stroking his mane, but the lion looked cross-eyed and stopped prancing and gave a sneeze right at pa, which blew pa clear across the tent to where the sacred cow had just got hers.  When the stuff began to work on that cow it was simply scandalous, ’cause she bellowed and cried and sneezed all at once, and pawed pa.  He got up and told me I was overdoing this waking up act on the animals.

By that time the cage of hyenas began to sneeze a quartette, and fight each other, and the atmosphere about their cage was full of hair and language that would be much like cussing if it could be translated into English.  Pa tried to quiet the crowd and silence the hyenas by taking an iron bar and mauling them, but the hyenas just backed up against the rear of the cage and howled and sneezed at pa, and dared him to come on.

[Illustration:  The Lion Sneezed and Blew Pa Clear Across the Tent.]

One of them caught him by the shirt sleeve and tore pa’s shirt off and eat it.  Pa was a sight, with no shirt on, and he ought to have gone to the dressing room and slicked, but just then the camels and the giraffes, who had inhaled their snuff, began to sneeze and beg to be killed, and pa had to go over there and quiet them.  A camel is the solemnist looking beast on earth when he tries to be good natured, but when he is sick and mad, and full of snuff, he is a fiend.  One such camel is enough for a man to handle, but when 14 camels are all sneezing at once, and trying to locate the person that is responsible for their trouble, it is the safest to keep away, and when pa went in amongst them, with no shirt on, and the Arab keepers had run away in fright, it was a dangerous thing to do.

But pa is brave even to rashness.  He went up to Mahomet, the double-humped leader of the herd, who was the leader of the sneezers, and kicked him in the slats and told him to hush up his noise.  He clubbed him on the humps with a tent stake.  Then there was a rebellion in Egypt, and Mahomet bit pa, and wouldn’t let go, and the other camels sneezed all over pa, and had him down, walking on him with their padded feet.  The circus hands had to pull pa out, and it wasn’t so bad, because the crowd remained and they thought it was a part of the show, and that the animals were trained to sneeze that way.