Balacchi Brothers?  And you’ve heard of them, eh?  Well, well! (with a pleased nod, rubbing his hands on his knees).  Yes, sir.  Fifteen years ago they were known as The Admirable Crichtons of the Ring.  It was George who got up that name:  I did not see the force of it.  But no name could claim too much for us.  Why, I could show you notices in the newspapers that—­I used to clip them out and stuff my pocket-book with them as we went along, but after I quit the business I pasted them in an old ledger, and I often now read them of nights.  No doubt I lost a good many, too.

Yes, sir:  I was one of Balacchi Brothers.  My name is Zack Loper.  And it was then, of course.

You think we would have plenty of adventures?  Well, no—­not a great many.  There’s a good deal of monotony in the business.  Towns seem always pretty much alike to me.  And there was such a deal of rehearsing to be done by day and at night.  I looked at nothing but the rope and George:  the audience was nothing but a packed flat surface of upturned, staring eyes and half-open mouths.  It was an odd sight, yes, when you come to think of it.  I never was one for adventures.  I was mostly set upon shaving close through the week, so that when Saturday night came I’d have something to lay by:  I had this mill in my mind, you see.  I was married, and had my wife and a baby that I’d never seen waiting for me at home.  I was brought up to milling, but the trapeze paid better.  I took to it naturally, as one might say.

But George!—­he had adventures every week.  And as for acquaintances!  Why, before we’d be in a town two days he’d be hail-fellow-well-met with half the people in it.  That fellow could scent a dance or a joke half a mile off.  You never see such wide-awake men nowadays.  People seem to me half dead or asleep when I think of him.

Oh, I thought you knew.  My partner Balacchi.  It was Balacchi on the bill:  the actors called him Signor, and people like the manager, South, and we, who knew him well, George.  I asked him his real name once or twice, but he joked it off.  “How many names must a man be saddled with?” he said.  I don’t know it to this day, nor who he had been.  They hinted there was something queer about his story, but I’ll go my bail it was a clean one, whatever it was.

You never heard how “Balacchi Brothers” broke up?  That was as near to an adventure as I ever had.  Come over to this bench and I’ll tell it to you.  You don’t dislike the dust of the mill?  The sun’s pleasanter on this side.

It was early in August of ’56 when George and I came to an old town on the Ohio, half city, half village, to play an engagement.  We were under contract with South then, who provided the rest of the troupe, three or four posture-girls, Stradi the pianist, and a Madame Somebody, who gave readings and sang.  “Concert” was the heading in large caps on the bills, “Balacchi Brothers will give their aesthetic tableaux vivants in the interludes,” in agate below.