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Dog Days of the Museum 61 Dog Days of the Museum ‘‘The Happy Family’’ menagerie, one of its best-loved attractions, exemplified this appeal. Within the one large cage, predator and prey coexisted harmoniously , ‘‘contentedly playing and frolicking together, without injury or discord .’’12 Puzzled visitors marveled that human agency could create the peaceable kingdom foretold in the Bible where natural enemies might lie side by side. Mark Twain was less than impressed by the condition of Barnum’s Museum in 1867. The old museum had burned to the ground in July 1865 and Barnum had opened a new premises with an entirely new collection farther up Broadway, between Spring and Prince Streets. But it was smaller, dingy, and for all Barnum’s resilence and waning enthusiasm, less interesting. Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, being heretofore uncollected sketches written by Mark Twain for the San Francisco Alta California in 1866 & 1867, describing the adventures of the author and his irrepressible companion in Nicaragua, Hannibal, New York, and other spots on their way to Europe, ed. Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane (New York: Knopf, 1940), 116–19. . . . I went to his museum yesterday, along with the other children. There is little or nothing in the place worth seeing, and yet how it draws! It was crammed with both sexes and all ages. One could keep on going up stairs from floor to floor, and still find scarcely room to turn. There are numerous trifling attractions there, but if there was one grand, absorbing feature I failed to find it. There is a prodigious woman, eight feet high, and well proportioned, but there was no one to stir her up and make her show her points, so she sat down all the time. And there is a giant, also, just her size; but he appears to be sick with love for her, and so he sat morosely on his platform, in his astonishing military uniform, and wrought no wonders. If I was impressario of that menagerie, I would make that couple prance around some, or I would dock their rations. Two dwarfs, unknown to fame, and a speckled negro, complete the list of human curiosities. They profess to have a Circassian girl there, but I could not find her. I think they moved her out, to make way for another peanut stand. In fact, Barnum’s Museum is one vast peanut stand now, with a few cases of dried frogs and other wonders scattered here and there, to give variety to the thing. You can’t go anywhere without finding a peanut stand, and an impudent negro sweeping up hulls. When peanuts and candy are slow, they sell newspapers and photographs of the dwarfs and giants. There are some cages of ferocious lions, and other wild beasts, but they sleep all the time. And also an automaton card writer; but something about it is broken, and it don’t go now. Also a good many bugs, with pins stuck through them; but the people do not seem to enjoy bugs any more. There is a photograph gallery in one room and an oyster saloon in another, and some news depots and soda fountains, a pistol gallery, and a raffling department for cheap jewelry, but not any barber shop. A plaster of Paris statue of Venus, with little stacks of dust on her nose and her eyebrows, stands THE DIME MUSEUM 62 neglected in a corner, and in some large glass cases are some atrocious waxen images, done in the very worst style of the art. Queen Victoria is dressed in faded red velvet and glass jewelry, and has a bloated countenance and a drunken leer in her eye, that remind one of convivial Mary Holt, when she used to come in from a spree to get her ticket for the County Jail. And that cursed eye-sore to me, Tom Thumb’s wedding party, which airs its smirking imbecility in every photograph album in America, is not only set forth here in ghastly wax, but repeated! Why does not some philanthropist burn the Museum again? The Happy Family remains, but robbed of its ancient glory. A poor, spiritless old bear—sixteen monkeys—half a dozen sorrowful raccoons—two mangy puppies—two unhappy rabbits—and two meek Tom cats, that have had half the hair snatched out of them by the monkeys, compose the Happy Family—and certainly it was the most subjugated-looking party I ever saw. The entire...

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