Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/92

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN but the concerted bits as well, and he never sang better or with more feeling in his life. The audience, convulsed by Dungan's mishap at first, was listening breathlessly to Oudin before he finished. When the curtain dropped, the rest of us rolled on the stage helpless in our mirth.

Oudin and I shared a dressing room. He had married Louise Parker, a prima donna, the previous year and they had a three months' old child whom they adored madly.

"How in the name of heaven did you do it?" I asked him when we were in the dressing room and I was able to speak again.

"I did it," he explained without a smile, "by picturing Louise and me in the first carriage following a white-plumed hearse carrying little Louise to her grave."

The child's death was purely supposititious. She was perfectly well then and she is living in England to-day.

When I first joined McCaull I noticed a painting of a magnificent horse on his office wall and commented upon it. The colonel was much affected. The horse was a stallion, a noble animal of Kentucky breeding and much endeared to him. In a bad season he had been