standing side by side, with a man seated on the
middle one; he could jump over a garter held
fourteen feet high, and kick a bladder at sixteen
feet; and at his own benefit he leaped over a
machine like a broad wheeled waggon with a tilt.
He had no spring-board, and jumped from an
inclined plane of three feet. Strutt saw him,
and examined his starting-place. Poor fellow!
He sprained the tendon of his heel at last, so his
fine vaulting got a little damaged. Joseph Clark,
who lived under Charles the Second, and died
in King William's reign— a tall thin well-made
man— was one of the great entortillationists of
the past. He could make himself up into all
manner of humps and deformities, and dislocate
his backbone in the most shocking manner;
plaguing the tailors to death by going to them as
a slender well-conditioned man, and receiving
his clothes as a crabbed and crooked old hump
back, with humps sticking out all over his
person, and not a joint in its proper place. Then
there was Powel the fire-eater, whom Strutt
saw eating burning coals brought from the fire,
and putting a lighted match into his mouth,
blowing the sulphur through his nostrils. He also
carried a red-hot heater round the room in his
teeth, and he, as Richardson had done before
him, broiled a piece of beefsteak on his tongue.
While the meat was broiling, one of his assistants
blew the charcoal that lay under his tongue,
to prevent the heat from decreasing, and in a short
time the beef was thoroughly cooked, and not
too much gravy remaining. By way of a
conclusion, he made a composition of pitch,
brimstone, and other combustibles, adding a small
piece of lead; he then melted it all in an iron
ladle and set it on fire. This was his " soup,"
and he spooned it out of the ladle with an iron
spoon, and ate it, boiling and blazing
as it was. Another worthy ate stones and
cracked them, or was said to do so, and
appeared to do so; he probably juggled them
away instead.

Then Clench, a Barnet man, was a wonderful
imitator of all things, living and dead. He was
in Queen Anne's time, and imitated horses,
huntsmen, and a pack of hounds, all at once;
he was great in drunken men and shrill old
women, but greatest of all in bells, flutes, the
double cantrell, and an organ with three voices.
He had a rival, one Rossignol, the foreshadowing
of Herr Joel, who sang all the notes of all
the birds, and played on a stringless violin,
making the music with his mouth. But some of
the more curious found out that he had a small
instrument concealed within his lips when he did
this, so his trick lost value. Taught animals—
dancing bears, learned pigs, the " ball of little
dogs," which personated line ladies and their
beaux so wonderfully well, canaries that made
themselves into grenadiers, and shot the deserter
canary at the word of command (this was at
Breslaw's), clever horses that could do everything
but talk, a rope-dancing ape as good as
human— all these came into the juggling department;
so did that brave little girl at Flockton's,
" a noted but clumsy juggler," who appeared
on the stage with four naked swords, two in
each hand, with which she danced with incredible
wiftness and dexterity; turning the weapons
now out, now in, sometimes thrusting them into
her bosom, sometimes holding them over her
head, then dashing them down by her side, at
last stopping suddenly after ten or fifteen
minutes of this perilous work, apparently never
a bit the worse. Sword-dancing was more
common once, than it is now. Even a child of
eight danced among the points of swords and
spears at Bartholomew Fair in Queen Anne's
time. And one of the Sadler's Wells company
said that all who went to his place should
see "a young woman dance with the sword,
and upon a ladder, surpassing all her sex."

One of the most wonderful (if true) bits of
jugglery that I have met with is to be found in
the Southern Literary Messenger of 1835, from
a manuscript of D. D. Mitchell, Esq., and
purporting to be an account of what the Arickara
Indians can do in that way. In 1831, Mr.
Mitchell and some friends, travelling up the
Missouri, lost their horses near an Arickara village.
Now, the Arickaras, says Mr. Mitchell, are
about the worst set of red men going, with all the
vices and none of the virtues of their race; but
they don't murder those whites who throw
themselves on their hospitality: the reason being,
that they once murdered a white man, and
his ghost haunted their village ever afterwards,
and frightened away the buffaloes. The
travellers therefore took lodgings in the village
itself, and the tribe all turned out to do them
honour. And one of their ways of doing them
honour was to show them what their band of
" bears," or "medicine-men," could do. In a
wigwam sat, in a circle, six men dressed as bears;
the spectators standing round them, and the white
men being given the best and nearest places.
For a few moments the bears kept a mournful
silence, then they bade a young brave go to a
certain part of the river-side, and bring them a
handful of stiff clay. The clay was brought,
and the bears set to work to mould it into
certain forms— buffaloes, men, and horses, bows
and arrows— nine of each kind, as by the true
bear recipe. They then placed all the buffaloes
in a line, and set the clay hunters on the clay
horses, with their bows and straw arrows in their
hands. They were about three feet distant from
the game, and in parallel lines. When
marshalled, the elder bear said: " My children, I
know that you are hungry; it has been a long time
since you have been out hunting. Exert
yourselves to-day. Try and kill as many as you can.
Here are white persons present, who will laugh
at you if you don't kill. Go! Don't you see
that the buffaloes have already got the scent of
you, and have started?" At the word all the
buffaloes started off at full speed, and the men
after them, shooting their straw arrows from
their clay bows, so that the buffaloes fell down
as if dead; but two of them ran round the whole
circumference of the circle, about fifteen or
twenty feet, and one received three and the
other five arrows before they fell over and