fooled, and he _was_ the sickest ringmaster you ever see, I reckon.  Why, it was one of his own men!  He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody. Well, I felt sheepish enough to be took in so, but I wouldn't a been in that ringmaster's place, not for a thousand dollars.  I don't know; there may be bullier circuses than what that one was, but I never struck them yet. Anyways, it was plenty good enough for _me_; and wherever I run across it, it can have all of _my_ custom every time. Well, that night we had _our_ show; but there warn't only about twelve people there--just enough to pay expenses.  And they laughed all the time, and that made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway, before the show was over, but one boy which was asleep.  So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy--and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned.  He said he could size their style.  So next morning he got some big sheets of wrapping paper and some black paint, and drawed off some handbills, and stuck them up all over the village.  The bills said: CHAPTER XXIII. WELL, all day him and the king was hard at it, rigging up a stage and a curtain and a row of candles for footlights; and that night the house was jam full of men in no time.  When the place couldn't hold no more, the duke he quit tending door and went around the back way and come on to the stage and stood up before the curtain and made a little speech, and praised up this tragedy, and said it was the most thrillingest one that ever was; and so he went on a-bragging about the tragedy, and about Edmund Kean the Elder, which was to play the main principal part in it; and at last when he'd got everybody's expectations up high enough, he rolled up the curtain, and the next minute the king come a-prancing out on all fours, naked; and he was painted all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid a