Explore "Two Shows" by Ambrose Bierce on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The showman (blessing in a thousand shapes!) / Parades a "School of Educated Apes!"
Small education's needed, I opine, / Or native wit, to make a monkey shine; / The brute exhibited has naught to do / But ape the larger apes who come to view -- / The hoodlum with his horrible grimace, / Long upper lip and furtive, shuffling pace, / Significant reminders of the time / When hunters, not policemen, made him climb; / The lady loafer with her draggling "trail," / That free translation of an ancient tail; / The sand-lot quadrumane in hairy suit, / Whose heels are thumbs perverted by the boot; / The painted actress throwing down the gage / To elder artists of the sylvan stage, / Proving that in the time of Noah's flood / Two ape-skins held her whole profession's blood; / The critic waiting, like a hungry pup, / To write the school -- perhaps to eat it -- up, / As chance or luck occasion may reveal / To earn a dollar or maraud a meal.