Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/45

Rh their arms. One of these volunteers was a man in his eighties. With an unnatural strength, born of the excitement of the moment, the octogenarian bore up his side more surely than did his companion, a man half his age, as Harris and I stumbled across the bending planks with the body, but once we were across, the old man collapsed in a heap.

I am one of two survivors of that company, I believe. The other is Miss Vivia Ogden, who played the child part. She made a name for herself later as a character woman, notably in "Way Down East" and "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch", and she is one of David Wark Griffith's stand-bys for character bits in his pictures to-day.

That was early on Christmas morning of 1880. Mississippi was only four years out of carpetbaggery and Rutherford B. Hayes was President. Jack Barrymore was a babe of six months. I was twenty-two. At twenty-two the sixties are of an incredible antiquity, and were infinitely more so in 1880, when strong men retired to the chimney corner in their early fifties. The frontiers of old age have been so extended in my life that I never have caught up with that receding boundary.