“I thought I could afford an orchestra stall, for once.  We were three in the orchestra, another man and a young mother, not counting the little boy she had with her; there were two people in the gallery, and a dozen at least in the orchestra circle.  An attendant shouted, ‘Hats off!’ and the other man and I uncovered, and a lady came up from under the stage and began to play the piano in front of it.  The curtain rose, and the entertainment began at once.  It was a passage apparently from real life, and it involved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of the landlady.  There was not much coherence in it, but there was a good deal of conscience on the part of the actors, who toiled through it with unflagging energy.  The young woman was equipped for the dance she brought into it at one point rather than for the part she had to sustain in the drama.  It was a very blameless dance, and she gave it as if she was tired of it, but was not going to falter.  She delivered her lines with a hard, Southwestern accent, and I liked fancying her having come up in a simpler-hearted section of the country than ours, encouraged by a strong local belief that she was destined to do Juliet and Lady Macbeth, or Peg Woffington at the least; but very likely she had not.

“Her performance was followed by an event involving a single character.  The actor, naturally, was blackened as to his skin, but as to his dress he was all in white, and at the first glance I could see that he had temperament.  I suspect that he thought I had, too, for he began to address his entire drama to me.  This was not surprising, for it would not have been the thing for him to single out the young mother; and the other man in the orchestra stalls seemed a vague and inexperienced youth, whom he would hardly have given the preference over me.  I felt the compliment, but upon the whole it embarrassed me; it was too intimate, and it gave me a publicity I would willingly have foregone.  I did what I could to reject it, by feigning an indifference to his jokes; I even frowned a measure of disapproval; but this merely stimulated his ambition.  He was really a merry creature, and when he had got off a number of very good things which were received in perfect silence, and looked over his audience with a woe-begone eye, and said, with an effect of delicate apology, ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you any,’ I broke down and laughed, and that delivered me into his hand.  He immediately said to me that now he would tell me about a friend of his, who had a pretty large family, eight of them living, and one in Philadelphia; and then for no reason he seemed to change his mind, and said he would sing me a song written expressly for him—­by an expressman; and he went on from one wild gayety to another, until he had worked his audience up to quite a frenzy of enthusiasm, and almost had a recall when he went off.