believe anything.  But if I ever get to be president I am going to appoint my negro assistant to a position in my cabinet, ’cause he is the greatest political organizer I ever saw.  He rounded up over 200 cotton pickers and negro men who work in the freight depots once in a while and started them out after hornets’ nests.  He gave them some change to get a drink, and promised them free passes into the show next night, and the next morning they showed up with hornets’ nests enough to scare you.  They put them in a dark place in the barn, so the hornets wouldn’t get curious and want to come out of the nests before they got their cue.

That afternoon we fitted them into the Chinese lanterns, and tied sticks on the lanterns and fixed the candles, and when night came there were more negroes than I could use, But I told them to follow along, and the door tender would let them in, and all they need to do was to yell for Teddy when I did, and so we marched to the main tent about the time the performance got to going.  I saw pa with his gang of white men go into the dressing room at about the same time.  The manager had timed it for us to come in about 8:30, into the main tent, when the elephants were in their pyramid act, so my crowd of negroes stopped in the menagerie tent half an hour waiting to be called.

I wish I wasn’t so confounded curious, but I suppose I was born that way.  I took one of the Chinese lanterns that was not lighted and just thought I would like to see what the hyenas and the big lion, who were in the same cage, with an iron partition between them, would do if a Chinese lantern was put in the cage, so I got the fellow that watches the cage to open up the top trap door, and I dropped a Chinese lantern with a hornets’ nest in it right between the two hyenas.  Gee, but you ought to have seen them pounce on it, and bite it and tear it up, and then the hornets woke up, and they didn’t do a thing to that mess of hyenas.  The hyenas set up a grand hailing sign of distress, and howled pitiful, and the lion raised up his head and looked at them through the bars as though he was saying, in a snarling way, “What you grave robbers howling about?  Can’t you keep still and let the czar of all the animals enjoy his after dinner nap?”

Just then the hyenas kicked what was left of the hornets’ nest under the bars into his side of the cage, and he put his foot on it and growled, and about a hundred hornets gave him his.  He gave an Abyssinian cough that woke all the animals, and then the hornets scattered and before I knew it the zebras were dancing a snake dance and all of them were howling as though they were in the ark, hungry, and the ark had landed on Mount Ararat.

Just then one of the assistant managers beckoned to me to lead in my procession and we lighted the candles in our Chinese lanterns.  I didn’t stop to see how the animals got along with the hornets, but I couldn’t help thinking that if one hornets’ nest could raise such a row, what would a hundred or so do when we got to going in the other tent?