Thus they get their chance.  Amateur night is a kindly boon.  It is charity divested of almsgiving.  It is a brotherly hand reached down by members of the best united band of coworkers in the world to raise up less fortunate ones without labelling them beggars.  It gives you the chance, if you can grasp it, to step for a few minutes before some badly painted scenery and, during the playing by the orchestra of some ten or twelve bars of music, and while the soles of your shoes may be clearly holding to the uppers, to secure a salary equal to a Congressman’s or any orthodox minister’s.  Could an ambitious student of literature or financial methods get a chance like that by spending twenty minutes in a Carnegie library?  I do not not trow so.

But shall we look in at Creary’s?  Let us say that the specific Friday night had arrived on which the fortunate Mac McGowan was to justify the flattering predictions of his distinguished patron and, incidentally, drop his silver talent into the slit of the slot-machine of fame and fortune that gives up reputation and dough.  I offer, sure of your acquiescence, that we now forswear hypocritical philosophy and bigoted comment, permitting the story to finish itself in the dress of material allegations—­a medium more worthy, when held to the line, than the most laborious creations of the word-milliners . . .

      [Page of (O.  Henry’s) manuscript missing here.]

. . . easily among the wings with his patron, the great Del Delano.  For, whatever footlights shone in the City-That-Would-Be-Amused, the freedom of their unshaded side was Del’s.  And if he should take up an amateur—­ see? and bring him around—­see? and, winking one of his cold blue eyes, say to the manager:  “Take it from me—­he’s got the goods—­see?” you wouldn’t expect that amateur to sit on an unpainted bench sudorifically awaiting his turn, would you?  So Mac strolled around largely with the nonpareil; and the seven waited, clammily, on the bench.

A giant in shirt-sleeves, with a grim, kind face in which many stitches had been taken by surgeons from time to time, i. e., with a long stick, looped at the end.  He was the man with the Hook.  The manager, with his close-smoothed blond hair, his one-sided smile, and his abnormally easy manner, pored with patient condescension over the difficult program of the amateurs.  The last of the professional turns—­the Grand March of the Happy Huzzard—­had been completed; the last wrinkle and darn of their blue silkolene cotton tights had vanished from the stage.  The man in the orchestra who played the kettle-drum, cymbals, triangle, sandpaper, whang-doodle, hoof-beats, and catcalls, and fired the pistol shots, had wiped his brow.  The illegal holiday of the Romans had arrived.

While the orchestra plays the famous waltz from “The Dismal Wife,” let us bestow two hundred words upon the psychology of the audience.