Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/108

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN them, my knees popped, my back cracked and my feet stung with the returning circulation. I knew all the sensations of Rip Van Winkle's waking. Surely it must be one o'clock. I looked at my watch. It said 10:45, and it was running, but it was a temperamental timepiece with a chronic habit of stopping and starting again with no apparent cause. So I phoned down to the hotel office.

"Twenty minutes of eleven," was the operator's answer.

I had committed "The Nightmare Song" in an hour and twenty minutes. I dressed and went to the Lambs Club to boast about it. My fellow Lambs were so skeptical that they bet me the drinks that I did not know it. In the barroom of the club I sang the song letter-perfect and won.

I have strayed afar from Wallack's Theater and the night of May 13, 1888. The bill was "Prince Methusalem" and I interpolated Casey in a scene in the second act. It was, I presume, the first time the poem was recited in public.

On his début Casey lifted this audience, composed largely of baseball players and fans, out of their seats. When I dropped my voice to B flat, below low C, at "the multitude was awed",