Page:A Leaf in the Storm.djvu/82

Rh compassionate. I was a little motherless, penniless, desolate wretch of five years old; ugly, too—brown and ugly, as you see me now, very much. I have had a face too good for comedy, too good to make the people laugh, for it ever to have been anything except grotesque and unlovely. But they were as good to me as though I had been beautiful to the sight and had inherited a patrimony.

The old men and the young, the beldames and the pretty women of the little company, vied with each other in charity and hospitality. True, they were all very poor, but what they had they never grudged to me. They took me with them everywhere, and never even dreamed of turning off the cost and trouble of me upon that bitter stepmother—the state.

As I grew older I took to the stage myself. I could not have imagined life lived to any other music than that of the little shrill reed-pipe and deep-rolling drum, that had drowned my first cries at my birth; and had awakened my laughter so many and many a time later on, that it seemed to me that their cheery sounds were as needful to all sense of existence as was the very light of the sun itself.

There were little things that a child could do, little parts that a child could play, and these I had and these I did almost from the time my mother left me alone