Also, I got Doc Sulloway, who happened to be in town, to promise he’d come and tell some funny anecdotes.  He ain’t a regular doctor—­he just took it up; a guy with long black curls and a big moustache and a big hat and diamond pin, that goes round selling Indian Snake Oil off a wagon.  Doc said he’d have his musician, Ed Bemis, come, too.  He said Ed was known far and wide as the world’s challenge cornetist.  I says all right, if he’ll play something neutral; and Doc says he’ll play “Listen to the Mocking Bird,” with variations, and play it so swell you’ll think you’re perched right up in the treetops listening to Nature’s own feathered songsters.

That about made up my show, including, of course, the Spanish dance by Beryl Mae Macomber.  Red Gap always expects that and Beryl Mae never disappoints ’em—­makes no difference what the occasion is.  Mebbe it’s an Evening with Shakespeare, or the Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, or that Oratorio by Elijah somebody, but Beryl Mae is right there with her girlish young beauty and her tambourine.  You see, I didn’t want it a long show—­just enough to make the two-bits admission seem a little short of robbery.  Our real graft, of course, was to be where the young society debutantes and heiresses in charge of the booths would wheedle money out of the dazed throng for chances on the junk that would be donated.

[Illustration:  “ALL SUNNED UP LIKE A MAN THAT KNOWS THE WORLD IS HIS OYSTER AND EVERY MONTH’S GOT AN ‘R’ IN IT”]

Well, about three days before the show I went up to Masonic Hall to see about the stage decorations, and I was waiting while some one went down to the Turf Exchange to get the key off Tim Mahoney, the janitor—­Tim had lately had to do janitor work for a B’nai B’rith lodge that was holding meetings there, and it had made him gloomy and dissolute—­and, while I was waiting, who should come tripping along but Egbert Floud, all sunned up like a man that knows the world is his oyster and every month’s got an “r” in it.  Usually he’s a kind of sad, meek coot, looking neglected and put upon; but now he was actually giggling to himself as he come up the stairs two at a time.

“Well, Old-Timer, what has took the droop out of your face?” I ask him.

“Why,” he says, twinkling all over the place, “I’m aiming to keep it a secret, but I don’t mind hinting to an old friend that my part of the evening’s entertainment is going to be so good it’ll make the whole show top-heavy.  Them ladies said they’d rely on me to think up something novel, and I said I would if I could, and I did—­that’s all.  I’d seen enough of these shows where you ladies pike along with pincushions and fancy lemonade and infants’ wear—­and mebbe a red plush chair, with gold legs, that plays ‘Alice, Where Art Thou?’ when a person sets down on it—­with little girls speaking a few pieces about the flowers and lambs, and so on, and cleaning up about eleven-twenty-nine on the evening’s revel—­or it would