Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/40

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN window said, "Excuse me, sir, but downstairs seats are seventy-five cents. Our twenty-five-cent seats are in the gallery."

The customer announced belligerently that he did not intend to pay more than two bits, and that he expected the best that money could buy.

He said it so pointedly that the treasurer pro tem came out of the box office declaring, "You'll go down those stairs for nothing, you big bum!" and was as good as his word.

The repulsed lover of the theater bounced down forty-two steps, picked himself up and left. But he returned. He returned with at least a tenfold two-bits investment in firecrackers, with which Dixie always has celebrated Christmas. Bunch by bunch he lit his crackers and hurled them up the steps into the lobby, where they exploded like a sham battle. Inside, the fifty-three-dollar audience took the recurring fusillades to be part of the show and applauded madly.

It was not a troupe of barnstormers that played to these indignities, but a company that included Mrs. Barrymore and Ada Gilman, two of the first actresses of their time, and, father of and. Will