He’d had a good-sized room just down the hall turned over to him, and a lot of stuff of some kind carried in there in the night, and men working, with the door locked all the time; so I and the other ladies went calmly on about our own business, decorating the main hall with the flags of all nations, fixing up the platform and the booths very pretty, and giving Mr. Smarty Egbert Floud nothing but haughty glances about his hidden novelty.  Even when his men was hammering away in there at their work he’d have something hung over the keyhole—­as insulting to us as only a man can be.

Saturday night come and we had a good crowd.  Cousin Egbert was after me the minute I got my things off to come and see his dastardly secret; but I had my revenge.  I told him I had no curiosity about it and was going to be awful busy with my show, but I’d try as a personal favour to give him a look over before I went home.  Yes, sir; I just turned him down with one superior look, and got my curtains slid back on Mrs. Leonard Wales, dressed up like a superdreadnought in a naval parade and surrounded by every little girl in town that had a white dress.  They wasn’t states this time, but Columbia’s Choicest Heritage, with a second line on the program saying, “Future Buds and Debutantes From Society’s Home Galleries.”  It was a line we found under some babies’ photos on the society page of a great newspaper printed in New York City.  Professor Gluckstein and his son Rudolph played the “Star-Spangled Banner” on the piano and fiddle during this feature.

Then little Magnesia Waterman, dressed to represent the Queen of Sheba, come forward and sung the song we’d picked out for her, with the people joining in the chorus: 

    We’re for you, Woodrow Wilson,
      One Hundred Million Strong! 
    We put you in the White House
      And we know you can’t do wrong.

It was very successful, barring hisses from all the Germans and English present; but they was soon hushed up.  Then Doc Sulloway come out and told some funny anecdotes about two Irishmen named Pat and Mike, lately landed in this country and looking for work, and imitated two cats in a backyard, and drawing a glass of soda water, and sawing a plank in two; and winding up with the announcement that he had donated a dozen bottles of the great Indian Snake Oil Remedy for man and beast that had been imparted to him in secret by old Rumpatunk, the celebrated medicine man, who is supposed to have had it from the Great Spirit; and Ed Bemis, the World’s Challenge Cornetist, entertained one and all; and Beryl Mae done her Spanish dance that I’d last seen her give at the Queen Esther Cantata in the M.E.  Church.  And that was the end of the show; just enough to start ’em buying things at the booths.