Chapter 21 - Page 2

looking up at the sky; and then he begins to rip and
rave and grit his teeth; and after that, all through his
speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up
his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting
ever I see before. This is the speech -- I learned it,
easy enough, while he was learning it to the king:

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do
come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his
pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night,
when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose
bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like
the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery -- go!

Well, the old man he liked that speech, and he
mighty soon got it so he could do it first-rate. It
seemed like he was just born for it; and when he had
his hand in and was excited, it was perfectly lovely
the way he would rip and tear and rair up behind
when he was getting it off.

The first chance we got the duke he had some show-
bills printed; and after that, for two or three days as
we floated along, the raft was a most uncommon lively
place, for there warn't nothing but sword fighting and
rehearsing -- as the duke called it -- going on all the
time. One morning, when we was pretty well down
the State of Arkansaw, we come in sight of a little
one-horse town in a big bend; so we tied up about
three-quarters of a mile above it, in the mouth of a
crick which was shut in like a tunnel by the cypress
trees, and all of us but Jim took the canoe and went
down there to see if there was any chance in that place
for our show.

We struck it mighty lucky; there was going to be a
circus there that afternoon, and the country people was
already beginning to come in, in all kinds of old
shackly wagons, and on