‘On the last night of our stay in Greenock, as soon as we had doffed the circus uniform, and the audience had departed, we took down our trapeze, and proceeded to the railway station. A special train had been engaged for the removal to Carlisle of all the company, the band, the stud, and the properties, Newsome paying for all. Having to make the journey by night, we did not see much of the scenery we passed through; but we had a good time, as the Yankees say, talking, joking, laughing, and singing all the way. We found at Carlisle as good a building as we had left at Greenock, and, having fixed up our trapeze, and taken a lodging, we walked round the city to see the lions, which are rather tame ones.
‘While we were at Carlisle, Hubert Mears was starring with us for a short time, doing the flying trapeze, and doing it, too, as well as ever I have seen it done. After him, we had Sadi Jalma, “the serpent of the desert,” for a time, and very serpent-like his contortions are; he can wriggle in and out the rounds of a ladder or a chair like an eel. He is like the acrobats that I once heard a couple of small boys holding a discussion about, one maintaining that they had no bones, and the other that their bones were made of gutta percha. He calls himself a Persian prince, but I don’t believe he is any relation to the Shah. He may be a Persian, for there are Arab, Hindoo, Chinese, and Japanese acrobats and jugglers knocking about over England, as well as Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians; but nationalities are as often assumed as names, and he may be no more a Persian than I am a Spaniard.
‘It is a praiseworthy custom of Newsome, to devote one night’s receipts to the charities of every town which he visits. It would require more time than he has to spare to make the inquiries and calculations that would be necessary before a stranger could distribute the money among the several institutions, so as to effect the greatest amount of good; and it is placed for that purpose at the disposal of the Mayor. The amount of money which he has thus given for the relief of the sick, the infirm, and the indigent during the time his circus has been travelling would have been a fortune in itself, if he had put it into his own pocket. He divides the year between four towns, and in one year he gave two hundred pounds to the charities of Preston, and forty pounds to the Seamen’s Orphans’ Asylum at Liverpool, besides what he gave to the similar institutions of the other towns which he visited that year.