I wonder if the clever American reporter stopped to think how his delivery of the same speech would look in print!  As for the ejaculations, the interjections and grunts with which Henry interlarded the text, they often helped to reveal the meaning of Shakespeare to his audience—­a meaning which many a perfect elocutionist has left perfectly obscure.  The use of “m’” or “me” for “my” has often been hurled in my face as a reproach, but I never contracted “my” without good reason.  I had a line in Olivia which I began by delivering as—­

    “My sorrows and my shame are my own.”

Then I saw that the “mys” sounded ridiculous, and abbreviated the two first ones into “me’s.”

There were of course people ready to say that the Americans did not like Henry Irving as an actor, and that they only accepted him as a manager—­that he triumphed in New York as he had done in London, through his lavish spectacular effects.  This is all moonshine.  Henry made his first appearance in “The Bells,” his second in “Charles I.,” his third in “Louis XI.”  By that time he had conquered, and without the aid of anything at all notable in the mounting of the plays.  It was not until we did “The Merchant of Venice” that he gave the Americans anything of a “production.”

My first appearance in America in Shakespeare was as Portia, and I could not help feeling pleased by my success.  A few weeks later I played Ophelia at Philadelphia.  It is in Shakespeare that I have been best liked in America, and I consider that Beatrice was the part about which they were most enthusiastic.

During our first tour we visited in succession New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit, and Toronto.  To most of these places we paid return visits.

“To what do you attribute your success, Mr. Irving?”

“To my acting,” was the simple reply.

We never had poor houses except in Baltimore and St. Louis.  Our journey to Baltimore was made in a blizzard.  They were clearing the snow before us all the way from New Jersey, and we took forty-two hours to reach Baltimore!  The bells of trains before us and behind us sounded very alarming.  We opened in Baltimore on Christmas day.  The audience was wretchedly small, but the poor things who were there had left their warm firesides to drive or tramp through the slush of melting snow, and each one who managed to reach the theater was worth a hundred on an ordinary night.

At the hotel I put up holly and mistletoe, and produced from my trunks a real Christmas pudding that my mother had made.  We had it for supper, and it was very good.

It never does to repeat an experiment.  Next year at Pittsburg my little son Teddy brought me out another pudding from England.  For once we were in an uncomfortable hotel, and the Christmas dinner was deplorable.  It began with burned hare soup.

“It seems to me,” said Henry, “that we aren’t going to get anything to eat, but we’ll make up for it by drinking!”