At the Princess’s Theater I had gained my experience of long rehearsals.  When I arrived in Bristol I was to learn the value of short ones.  Mr. Chute took me in hand, and I had to wake up and be alert with brains and body.  The first part I played was Cupid in “Endymion.”  To this day I can remember my lines.  I entered as a blind old woman in what is known in theatrical parlance as a “disguise cloak.”  Then, throwing it off, I said: 

    “Pity the poor blind—­what no one here? 
    Nay then, I’m not so blind as I appear,
    And so to throw off all disguise and sham,
    Let me at once inform you who I am! 
    I’m Cupid!”

Henrietta Hodson as Endymion and Kate as Diana had a dance with me which used to bring down the house.  I wore a short tunic which in those days was considered too scanty to be quite nice, and carried the conventional bow and quiver.

In another burlesque, “Perseus and Andromeda,” I played Dictys; it was in this piece that Arthur Wood used to make people laugh by punning on the line:  “Such a mystery (Miss Terry) here!” It was an absurd little joke, but the people used to cheer and applaud.

At the end of my first season at Bristol I returned to London for a time to play at the Haymarket under Mr. Buckstone, but I had another season at Bristol in the following year.  While my stage education was progressing apace, I was, through the influence of a very wonderful family whose acquaintance we made, having my eyes opened to beautiful things in art and literature.  Mr. Godwin, the architect and archaeologist, was living in Bristol when Kate and I were at the Theater Royal, and we used to go to his house for some of the Shakespeare readings in which our Bristol friends asked us to take part.  This house, with its Persian rugs, beautiful furniture, its organ, which for the first time I learned to love, its sense of design in every detail, was a revelation to me, and the talk of its master and mistress made me think.  At the theater I was living in an atmosphere which was developing my powers as an actress and teaching me what work meant, but my mind had begun to grasp dimly and almost unconsciously that I must do something for myself—­something that all the education and training I was receiving in my profession could not do for me.  I was fourteen years old at Bristol, but I now felt that I had never really lived at all before.  For the first time I began to appreciate beauty, to observe, to feel the splendor of things, to aspire!

I remember that in one of the local papers there had appeared under the headline “Jottings” some very wonderful criticisms of the performances at the theater.  The writer, whoever he was, did not indulge in flattery, and in particular he attacked our classical burlesques on the ground that they were ugly.  They were discussing “Jottings” one day at the Godwins’ house, and Kate said it was absurd to take a burlesque so seriously.  “Jottings” was all wrong.