went into the river bottoms and cut a whole lot of “pussy willow” cuttings, delivered them to the farmers and got their money, and went away.  When the pussy willow cuttings died in their tracks, or grew up just plain pussy willows that never got high enough to hide a jack rabbit, the farmers of Kansas loaded their guns and waited for pa and the brakeman to come back to Kansas, but they never went back.

The brakeman became president of a great railroad, but when he has to go across the continent in his special car, he dodges Kansas, and goes across by the northern or southern route.  Pa has so far dodged the farmers, but money wouldn’t have hired him to stay with the circus and meet those farmers that they sold the willow gold bricks to.  And yet, when I bunco anybody around the show, pa takes me one side and tells me that honesty is the best policy, and to never lie, ’cause my character as a man will depend on the start I make as a boy.  He don’t want me to go through life regretting the past, and being afraid of the cars for fear some act of my younger days will become known and queer me.  I guess pa knows how it is hisself.

Well, if there is one thing I am proud of, it is that I have always been good.  When I grow up to be a man, prosperous in business, and belonging to a church, and married, and have children growing up around me, I can put on an innocent face and a bold front, and point to my past with pride, if I should go to live among strangers, where nobody took the papers, and the people were not on to me.  Pa says as long as your conscience is clear, and your pores open, life is one glad, sweet song.  Well, I don’t know, but if pa’s conscience is clear, he must have strained it the way they do rain water, to get the wigglers out, or else he has used an egg to settle his conscience, the way they settle coffee.  If his pores are open, he has opened them in the old way, with a corkscrew.  But, with all I have had to contend with in the way of a frightful example from pa, I am not so worse.

How many boys of my age, do you suppose, could put in a season with a circus and have all the facilities I have had to go wrong, and come out as well as I have?  The way the freaks just doted on me would have turned the heads of most boys, but when I found out that all of them, from the fat woman and the bearded woman, to the trapeze performers, ate onions three times a day, I said:  “Nay, nay, Hennery will camp with the animals, whose smell is natural, and not acquired.”

Say, do you know I have saved hundred of boys this summer from ruin, ’cause in every town there are lots of boys who want to run away from home and go off with a circus, and ’cause I belonged to the show they all came to me, and pa appointed me to discourage the boys, and drive them away from the show.  I know in Virginia all the boys wanted to run away, and but for me the state wouldn’t have boys enough to grow up and shoot the negroes.  But when I found boys who wanted to skip away from home, I would give them a job, and they would have slept in the straw with the horses, and eaten at the second table after the negroes had been fed, if they could only shake their comfortable homes and loving friends and join a traveling circus.