Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/30

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN for Libby Prison, and the fourth was sightless. Each had performed incredible deeds of heroism and was rather immodest about it.

When the fourth little husband had recited his Iliad and his Odyssey, the four little wives arose and in a singsong declaimed, "We, too, have not been idle."

They left the stage momentarily to return each with her favorite doll in her arms. I have seen and played in many dramas, but none with a more effective curtain. Their elders were convulsed and the players accepted this enjoyment as a spontaneous tribute to their art.

As a boy of fifteen I appeared in Ralph Roister Doister, earliest of all known English comedies, at a Sunday-school entertainment at Octavius Brooks Frothingham's Unitarian Church, and before that I had been giving, on the slightest provocation, my Senator Dillworthy monologue, in which I, with the aid of a silk hat and a Lawyer Marks umbrella, burlesqued the spread-eagle school of oratory.

When I graduated at twenty to the professional stage, I reversed the usual matriculation of the actor by beginning well up the ladder and skidding downward. In an amateur performance, for charity, of "Conscience" at the