“I wonder if I can?” said Umboo.
“Try it,” urged his new friend.
And when the man loosed the ropes, and let Umboo’s
front legs down, after they had hoisted them up once,
he suddenly gave a little spring, and up he went,
standing on his hind legs all by himself, and almost
as good as the trick beast could do it.
“Well, I declare!” cried one of the men.
“That elephant is the smartest one we ever trained.
He does the trick after being shown just once!”
“Oh, yes, I knew he was smart when he did that
handkerchief trick,” said the man from India.
“Umboo will be ready to join the circus before
any of the others.”
Once more Umboo was hoisted up by the ropes, but there
was really no need for it. He knew what was wanted
of him, and he did it.
“That’s fine!” said the big elephant.
“If you learn the other things as easily as
you learned this trick, you will have no trouble.”
“Are there other tricks to learn.” asked
Umboo.
“Oh, many of them,” answered Wang, the
best trick elephant in the circus. “You
have only just begun.”
And Umboo found that this was so. In the ten
days that followed he was taught many more tricks.
Some of them he did not learn so easily as he had
the one of standing on his hind legs, and the ropes
had to be used many times. But the other trick
elephants, of whom there was more than one, showed
the untrained ones what to do, and, in time, Umboo
and his friends could go through many “stunts,”
as the circus men called them.
Umboo learned to lie down and “play dead,”
he learned to stand on a little stool, like an over-turned
washtub, he learned to kneel down over a man stretched
on the ground, and not crush him with the great body,
weighing more than two tons of coal.
Other tricks, which Umboo learned, were to take pennies
in his trunk, lift up a lid of a “bank,”
which was a big box, drop the pennies in and ring
a bell, as if he had put money in a cash drawer.
He also learned to turn the handle of a hand organ
with his trunk, to ring a dinner bell, and do many
other tricks, such as you have seen elephants do in
a circus.
Then, one day, the man from India came where Umboo
was, and giving him some peanuts, which our friend
had learned to like very much, said:
“Well, now it is time you joined the circus.
You know enough tricks to make a start, and your circus-trainer
will teach you more. So off to the circus you
go, Umboo! Off to the circus!”
And the next day Umboo went.
UMBOO REMEMBERS
Brightly in the sun gleamed the white tents.
In the wind the gay flags fluttered. Here and
there were men selling pink lemonade and peanuts.
Around the green grass were the big wagons—wagons
that needed eight or ten horses to pull, wagons shining
with gold and silver mirrors— heavy, rumbling
wagons, which Umboo and the other elephants had to
push out of the mud when the horses could not pull
them.
