I was in the office of the old Evening Post, at St. Louis one afternoon in 1879, when it was invaded by Capt. M.Y. Bates and wife, the tallest married couple in the world. They were travelling with Cole's circus, and by invitation of the managing editor, who wanted them interviewed, they visited the newspaper office. A very small reporter had been assigned to do the talking, and he waited patiently around the establishment until a carriage drove up to the door and a shout went up, "Here they come," at the sound of which the interviewer hurriedly made for the waste-basket which was under the table. Whether the giant and giantess saw the diminutive reporter or not they kept on coming in, and the scribe saw no other way out of it than to dive into the ample recesses of the basket, and nestle upon a bed of school-girl poetry, statesmen's essays, and applications from last year's and the coming year's college graduates, for managing editorship. There is a barbaric sesquepedalianism (which is a good long word to ring into a chapter about six-storied people) and a prevailing atmosphere of suffocation in such a waste-basket; nevertheless, the tiny reporter crouched closer as the Brobdignaggian people approached with a rabble that noised their heels upon the floor, their tongues against the roofs of their mouths, and that made things look and sound as if all the quarreling powers of Europe had set their combined forces down in the Evening Post office for the special purpose of driving the senses of its whole staff out through the top of the building. But all this was seraphic bliss compared with the awful moment when the giant captain deliberately sat down on the table just over the waste-basket. It would take a million horse-power jackscrew, I should think, to raise the fallen hopes of the reporter just then. A man stands some chance if a custom-house falls on him hurriedly, but chance crushed to earth never rises again, when a giant like this is threatening to make any easy-chair out of him. I suppose nearly everybody has heard the funny story about the fat woman and the living skeleton, in a New York museum, who fell in love with each other. They got along very nicely for a while, and were as affectionate as if the two had pooled their issues of flesh, blood, and bone, and divided up so that each tipped the scale at two hundred and sixty pounds, instead of the whale-like spouse tipping the scale at four hundred and ninety, while the skeleton husband did not need any more than a thirty-pound section of the beam to balance his weight. They were as happy as the sweetest of the singing birds until one day the husband allowed his heart to stray off to the Circassian girl, who had been originally born in Ireland, but had her hair curled for a short side-show engagement. Mr. Skeleton was making the weightiest kind of love to the fair Circassian for probably a month before the fat woman was made aware of the fact. Then the monster that is usually represented as green-eyed, took possession of her. She kept a careful vigil of all "Skin-and-bones'" doings, as she called him, until one day she found him during the noon hour, with his lean arms around the Circassian girl's neck, and his thin lips glued to her pouting labials of cherry-red. It is impossible to describe the terrible manner in which she swooped down upon Mr. Skeleton. It was enough to say that she covered space with alarming rapidity, and taking her thirty-pound husband by the back of the neck, shook an Irish jig out of his rattling bones, after which she threw him on the floor and deliberately sat upon him. The vivacious showman who told this story said a millstone could not have made a nicer sheet of wall-paper out of the living skeleton, had one fallen on him, and only for the buttons on his vest he could have been pushed through the crack under the door, after the fat woman got through with him. But to come back to Capt. Bates, the table upon which he had seated himself groaned, and the little reporter moaned. The fleeting seconds were magnified into centuries, and the man in the waste-basket afterwards told me that he felt himself shrinking into something like a homoeopathic pill. The table, however, appeared to stand the pressure a great deal better than the person under it, and it was sometime before the latter came to reconcile himself to the safety of his situation. When he did so he peeped out.

The sight that met his gaze was a curious one. There was the great towering giantess, of pleasing features and with nothing of a "fee-fo-fum" air about her, quietly seated in the editor's chair, taking in the situation as if she had been accustomed to the thing since Adam's father was bald-headed. And there were the editors and news-hunters gazing on admiringly, with one or two of them particularly awe-stricken and wild-eyed. But the background was the thing. It was a circus in itself. At the doors and windows, upon tables and chairs, and perched further up on the top of an inoffensive and weak partition, as high as the giant himself, was a ghastly array of gaping mouths and bursting eyes in a setting of eager and dirty faces,—inside and out, high and low, anywhere and everywhere around the institution within seeing distance were newsboys and boot-blacks till one couldn't rest; with a dim and distant horizon of more respectable visitors who had been tempted in by the unusual scene and noise. After the usual courtesies had been interchanged, the editor remarked:—

"I had a young fellow assigned to interview you, Captain, but I don't know where he is just now."

"Perhaps he's gone to git an extension ladder," suggested a forward newsboy.

"No, Skinny," said another; "he told me he was going to get old Stout's balloon."

At this moment there was a commotion under the table. The giant's foot had swung back and collided with the waste-basket. To say it was a big foot would be like calling the pyramid of Cheops a brick-bat or the Colossus of Rhodes an Italian plaster-cast. They say Chicago girls have big feet; I don't know this to be a fact, but if they have anything like the pedal spread of Captain Bates they are entitled to the credit generally given them of greatness in this way. At any rate the collision between the foot and the basket caused the recondite reporter to disclose his whereabouts. The managing editor qualified his conduct as unbecoming a newspaper man, and the giant himself gently requested the scribe to come forward.

"You won't make a watch-charm out of me?" queried the reporter, apprehensively.

"No, no," the giant answered, in an assuring tone.

"Nor a scarf-pin?"

The giant said he wouldn't.

This allayed the reporter's fears, and he came forward from the atmosphere of "respectfully declined" literature in which he had been. Capt. Bates's greeting was most kind, and so was that of his wife. The reporter saw at once there had been no necessity for his previous timidity, and managing to get within a couple of yards of the giant's ear, he excused his awkward and silly actions. A pleasant chat followed, in which the giant and giantess gave brief outlines of their personal history.

Capt. Bates is now (1879) thirty-five years of age, stands seven feet eleven and one-half inches in height, and weighs about four hundred and eighty pounds. He is well put together, handsome in features, genial in speech, and has the reputation of being a sharp, shrewd man of the world. Mrs. Bates is thirty-two years old, of the same height as her husband, although she really seems to be taller, and turns the scales at about four hundred and twenty pounds. She is thinner in form, but of excellent physique, is handsome, and has the same frank and smiling expression on her face as that constantly worn by her husband. She says she likes the show business, because it brings her in contact with so many persons. The Captain, though, having been in it about twelve years, and accumulated considerable means, does not care much about parading his colossal proportions before the public. It has been his desire of late years to live in private, quietly on his farm in Ohio, where the couple have a house built expressly for them, with doors, windows, furniture, etc., on a giant scale; but until this year they received so many handsome offers that they forsook the sod for the sawdust, and the plow for the platform. In 1880, I think it was, a giant child was born to this enormous couple. The infant weighed twenty-eight pounds at birth.

After listening patiently to the Captain and his wife as they spoke of themselves, the little reporter whom I have introduced the reader to already, suggested as he nearly dislocated his neck in looking up at the lofty couple, that it would have been a nice thing to be around when they were making love to each other, but Mrs. Bates said that was rather a delicate matter to call up, and the reporter subsided. I could not help thinking, however, that a fellow must feel awful queer with four hundred and odd pounds of sweetheart upon his knee. Himalayan hugging going on all the time, and love-sighs that needed a Jacob's ladder to come from the heart-depths playing above his head like mountain zephyrs around the Pike's Peak signal service station. And then when a fellow felt his love away down in his boots, what an Atlantic cable job it must have been to find out exactly where it was! And the old garden gate, how it must have been like the gates that brave Samson shouldered with probably a little extra bracing to it. And what chewing-gum swopping must have gone on, and ice cream eating, perhaps a plate as large as a Northland jokel at a time, and no two spoons in it, either? Oh, but it must have been a heavenly thing!

"You weren't afraid of her big brother, Captain, were you?" friendly interrogated the reporter.

"Oh, no; not at all," answered the Captain.

"If you sat down on him once you could have sold him for a bundle of tissue paper, couldn't you?"

"That is not it, my boy," said the Captain. "She didn't have any big brother."

"Oh, yes, I see."

Then the discourse turned into other channels, intended to be of special interest to splacmucks—as the Brobdignaggians called ordinary mortals—who are contemplating marriage with giantesses. "I suppose Mrs. Bates does not wield an ordinary rolling-pin?" the reporter half queried, addressing himself to Capt. Bates.

"No, indeed," the lady herself replied, laughingly. "I have one made expressly for my own use, from one of the largest of the Yosemite Valley trees."

"And you lay it on the old man now and then?" the reporter asked.

"I can answer for that," put in the Captain. "She sometimes brings it down so heavily on the rear elevation of my skull that it feels as if I had run against a pile-driver on a drunk or lost my way under the hammers of a quartz mill."

Mrs. Bates certainly had the physical strength to make a rolling-pin dance a lively jig in any direction, and if the weapon is anything at all like what it is here represented to be, Thor's celebrated hammer will have to go to the hospital as a weak and debilitated concern until the giants lay their domestic difficulties aside and retire permanently from active service.

"It must be a gigantic thing when the Captain comes home late at night, from the lodge, you know, falls through the kitchen window into a pan of dishes, and after stumbling up stairs goes to bed with his boots on?" the reporter insinuated, as he looked sorrowfully at the giantess.

"Oh, he never does that," said the lady; and after a minute she added, "and he'd better not."

The giantess looked knowingly at the giant who looked down at the floor. My thoughts wreathed themselves fondly around the Yosemite-tree rolling-pin, and I guess Capt. Bates's thoughts were turned in the same direction.

"Nobody ever dares to write billet-doux to Mrs. Bates," said the reporter. "I suppose you know circus and theatrical people are subject to that sort of thing."

"Not any body that I know of," the Captain answered.

"And I suppose if anybody did they wouldn't care about having you know it, either?" said the little Evening Post man.

The Captain made no reply, but a mysterious kind of look crowded into his eyes, and if anybody around the newspaper office had dared to entertain a spark of affection for the giantess he could see at once that he didn't stand the ghost of a show while the giant was around.

"Now, Captain," the tiny and timid reporter remarked, moving to a distance, "I know you like travelling, and I have one more question I would like to ask you. It is about hotel accommodations. Don't you occasionally have to hang your head or feet over the ends of the beds you encounter?"

This question disgusted the Captain and he rose from the table indignantly, as did Mrs. Bates from the editorial chair, and doubling themselves up as they reached the doorway they majestically swept out of the newspaper office, and stepping into their carriage were driven away.

Another notable giant is Colonel Routh Goshan, who was born in the city of Jerusalem, on the 5th day of May, '37, of Arabian parents. He is the youngest of a family of 15 children, who like himself, father and mother were all giants. He served with distinction in the Crimean war, and afterwards in the Mexican army.

Colonel Goshen stands 7 feet 11 inches in his stocking feet, and measures 75 inches around the chest, 25 inches around the arm, and wears a No. 11 shoe. His weight is 666 pounds.