To their minds it was superior to the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
How many years ago that was! Where now is Billy Rice?
He was a joy to me, and so were the other stars of the nigger-show--Billy Birch, David Wambold, Backus, and a delightful dozen of their brethren, who made life a pleasure to me forty years ago, and later.

Birch, Wambold, and Backus are gone years ago; and with them departed to return no more forever, I suppose, the real nigger-show--the genuine nigger-show, the extravagant nigger-show,--the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience.

We have the grand opera; and I have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.

But if I could have the nigger-show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, I should have but little further use for opera.

It seems to me that to the elevated mind and the sensitive spirit the hand-organ and the nigger-show are a standard and a summit to whose rarefied altitude the other forms of musical art may not hope to reach.
[_Dictated September 5, 1906._] It is years since I have examined "The Children's Record." I have turned over a few of its pages this morning.
This book is a record in which Mrs.Clemens and I registered some of the sayings and doings of the children, in the long ago, when they were little chaps.