COMIC ENTERTAINMENTS. 311 
of the prompter or repeater to the chief. He is more properly a clown than 
a tumbler or an athlete. One of his most ‘‘taking” performances is to pre- 
tend that a bear has crawled under the hollow slab which is used for a drum, 
whereupon he fastens him in, and seizing something which is supposed to 
represent his tail he twists it until Bruin roars lustily. Then he binds 
up straws and splinters into a bundle about as large as one’s little finger, 
and with prodigious effort, grunting and staggering, he lifts it on his back, 
and tries to carry it, but falls sprawling all along on his belly, crushed to 
the earth by his enormous burden. Next, he offers somebody an (empty) 
basket of soup, pretending that it is very, very heavy. He smells it and 
smacks his mouth over it, and makes motions as if taking swallows of it 
and licking his lips. Then when the receiver takes it and places it to his 
lips he raises it up so far in the effort to get some soup out of it that he fails 
over backward. Now, perhaps, he mounts the roof of the house with a 
fish-gig in his hand, and after many false starts and absurd flourishes he 
thrusts his spear into a fish prepared for the purpose, driving it in with a 
comically surperfluous force all the way through from its snout to the utter- 
most tip of its tail, and perhaps a yard beyond. The fish flounces about to 
such a degree that he requires the assistance of eight or ten men to land 
him, and these all tug frantically at the spear, and finally they get their 
lees tangled up and fall in a heap together. Another performance they have 
which is more properly acrobatic than those previously described. The 
clown (sometimes two), showily and fantastically arrayed in feathers and 
paint, climbs a pole and hangs head downward from a cross-bar and sings, 
while a company dance underneath. Four men stand close together and 
join hands; then four others climb up on their shoulders, standing up, and 
four more on top of these; then those underneath walk about, and the 
twelve join in singing. 
All this tumbling and tomfoolery goes under the general name of 
kuk’-kun, and “brings down the house” with irrepressible laughter, for the 
simple savages are very easily amused. 
Another feat, called yan'-i-nih, is executed in the following manner: 
Three or more men stand in a ring, and by bending their legs they hook 
them together in such a manner that each of them stands on one foot. In 
