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devices, my eye! To the impure, all things are impure. “Just you send that telegraph,” I told him, “and you’ll be soon rid of both of us.”
    Now, now, boy, let me explain. Doesn’t it strike you that we’ve had enough of England? Whoa! No chucking your filth on the walls, that’s a low habit. Hear me out. I know what a patriotic heart you’ve got—specially considering you come from the French Sudan, not our Empire at all—but how have you been repaid? Yes, the plain people dote on you, but it strikes me that you’ve grown out of these cramped quarters. If the Society’s condemned you to transportation for smashing a few walls and shocking a few members’ wives, why, then—let’s up stakes and be off to pastures new, I say. You’re not twenty-one yet, and I’m not fifty. We’re self-made prodigies, come up from nothing and now headline news. We can make a fresh start in the land of the free and home of the brave. We’ll be ten times as famous, and won’t England feel the loss of us, won’t Victoria weep!
    I expect the superintendent will call me in right after lunch, the wonders of modern telegraphy being what they are. (Whatever Barnum offers me, I’ll accept it. The Society can kiss my you-know-exactly-what-I-mean.) I’ll come straight back here and lead you out to the crate. Now, whatever you do, Jumbo, don’t make a liar of me. I don’t have any secret signals or hidden powers; all I can think to do is to walk into the crate first, and turn, and open my arms and call you. Trust me, dearest boy, and I’ll see you safe across the ocean, and stay by your side for better for worse, and take a father’s and mother’s care of you till the end. Are you with me?
     
     
     
     

Man and Boy
    This story is based on almost daily reports in the Times of London between January and April 1882, as well as Superintendent Abraham Bartlett’s hostile account in his Wild Animals in Captivity (1898), and the ghostwritten 1885 Autobiography of Matthew Scott, Jumbo’s Keeper. Even after Matthew Scott persuaded Jumbo into his crate, the controversy—nicknamed “Jumbomania” or “the Jumbo movement”—lingered for several months on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring songs, poems, jokes, cartoons, advertisements, and the sale of “Jumbo” cigars, collars, fans, earrings, perfume, and ice cream.
    Jumbo toured with Barnum’s troupe over four very successful seasons (and showed no further sign of the aggression that dental analysis now suggests can be blamed on impacted molars, due to his low-fiber diet). In 1885, as Scott led him across a railway track after a performance in St. Thomas, Ontario, the elephant was killed by an unscheduled freight train. Barnum rehired Scott for one more season to introduce audiences to Jumbo’s stuffed hide. Despite pressure to return to England, Scott hung on near the circus’s winter headquarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he died in 1914 in the almshouse, aged around eighty. Jumbo’s hide was lost in a fire, but his skeleton lies in storage at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York.

LONDON
    1854
     
     
     
     

ONWARD
    C aroline always prepares Fred’s breakfast herself. Her young brother’s looking sallow around the eyes. “We saved you the last of the kippers,” she says in a tone airy enough to give the impression that she and Pet had their fill of kippers before he came down this morning.
    Mouth full, Fred sings to his niece in his surprising bass.
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can
And looks the whole world in the face
For he owes not any man.
    Pet giggles at the face he’s pulling. Caroline slides her last triangle of toast the child’s way. Pet’s worn that striped frock since spring. Is she undersized for two years old? But then girls are generally smaller. Are the children Caroline sees thronging the parks equally twiglike under their elaborate coats? “Where did you pick that one up?” she asks