on the handbills, and you can announce that the cannon that the Strong
Woman fires from her shoulder weighs a hundred or two pounds more than
it actually weighs; but unless a Strong Woman is really strong and no
mistake, she might as well try to pass herself off as a Living Skeleton
or a Two-Headed Girl at once. The fact is, the great majority of Freaks
are genuine, and the business is a thoroughly honest one at bottom. Why,
if you told the exact truth in the handbills about every Freak in my
show, barring the Tattooed Girl and the Wild Man, they would still
constitute a good drawing attraction in any intelligent community.

"This Female Samson was a good sort of woman in her way, though she was
a little rough and a bit what you might call masculine in her ways. She
didn't like the Dwarf, and he didn't like her.

[Illustration: "SHE PULLED HIM OVER TO HER BY HIS COLLAR."]

"The Freaks were all at supper one night when the Dwarf said something
insulting to the Female Samson. He sat right opposite to her, and she
just reached across the table and pulled him over to her by his collar.
Then she stretched him across her lap and laid into him with her slipper
till he howled as if he was a small boy who had gone in swimming on
Sunday and his mother had just found it out. It wasn't so much the
slipper that hurt him, though the Female Samson put all her muscle into
the operation, but it was the disgrace of the thing; and when you
remember that the Dwarf was forty-two years old, you can understand that
he felt that the woman had taken a liberty with him. However, the next
day he seemed to have forgotten all about it, and when the Giant
reminded him of the circumstance, which he did every little while, the
Dwarf would grin and say that we must let the women do what they liked,
for they were a superior sort of being.