Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/54

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN whispered, "Willie, I think you had better retire to the rectory."

"Please, Doctor Potter, may I go too?" the contralto pleaded hysterically.

"You may, and I wish I might go with you," the future bishop of New York replied.

I found no one anxious to engage my singing voice the following season and fell back on the legitimate. Fred Williams, father of Fritz Williams, who has been playing the doctor in "Rain" for these past three years, was stage manager at the Madison Square. Williams was the author of "The Blackbird" in which I had played with Harrigan and Hart, and through him I found a place as Pittacus Green in "Hazel Kirke" with the road company of the Madison Square.

Hazel was, I believe, the first of the wronged heroines, the Our Nells, of our drama, a theme that later was done to death and to burlesque. A simple Scotch lass wooed and won by a plausible Englishman and cast out by her stern father, she discovered too late that she had been married under the Scottish rite on English soil — but not altogether too late, for eventually they lived happily ever afterward. Probably "Hazel Kirke" has not been played in America for at