My dresser, Sarah Holland, came to me, I think, during “Romeo and Juliet.”  I never had any other dresser at the Lyceum except Sally’s sister Lizzie, who dressed me during the first few years.  Sally stuck to me loyally until the Lyceum days ended.  Then she perceived “a divided duty.”  On one side was “the Guv’nor” with “the Guv’nor’s” valet Walter, to whom she was devoted; on the other was a precarious in and out job with me, for after the Lyceum I never knew what I was going to do next.  She chose to go with Henry, and it was she and Walter who dressed him for the last time when he lay dead in the hotel bedroom at Bradford.

Sally Holland’s two little daughters “walked on” in “Romeo and Juliet.”  Henry always took an interest in the children in the theater, and was very kind to them.  One night as we came down the stairs from our dressing-rooms to go home—­the theater was quiet and deserted—­we found a small child sitting forlornly and patiently on the lowest step.

“Well, my dear, what are you doing here?” said Henry.

“Waiting for mother, sir.”

“Are you acting in the theater?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what part do you take?”

“Please, sir, first I’m a water-carrier, then I’m a little page, and then I’m a virgin.”

Henry and I sat down on the stairs and laughed until we cried!  Little Flo Holland was one of the troop of “virgins” who came to wake Juliet on her bridal morn.  As time went on she was promoted to more important parts, but she never made us laugh so much again.

Her mother was a “character,” a dear character.  She had an extraordinarily open mind, and was ready to grasp each new play as it came along as a separate and entirely different field of operations!  She was also extremely methodical, and only got flurried once in a blue moon.  When we went to America and made the acquaintance of that dreadful thing, a “one-night stand,” she was as precise and particular about having everything nice and in order for me as if we were going to stay in the town a month.  Down went my neat square of white drugget; all the lights in my dressing-room were arranged as I wished.  Everything was unpacked and ironed.  One day when I came into some American theater to dress I found Sally nearly in tears.

“What’s the matter with you, Sally?” I asked.

“I ’aven’t ’ad a morsel to heat all day, dear, and I can’t ’eat my iron.”

“Eat your iron, Sally!  What do you mean?”

“’Ow am I to iron all this, dear?” wailed Sally, picking up my Nance Oldfield apron and a few other trifles.  “It won’t get ’ot.”

Until then I really thought that Sally was being sardonic about an iron as a substitute for victuals!

When she first began to dress me, I was very thin, so thin that it was really a grief to me.  Sally would comfort me in my thin days by the terse compliment: 

“Beautiful and fat to-night, dear.”