Page:The principal girl (IA principalgirl00snai).pdf/57

 Right up she went through the middle register, tearing her poor throat to pieces at every note she took. Fairly launched the painter—"Nelson and his Gentlemen in Blue." Don't know whose the words are—Swinburne maybe, or Campbell Thomas, or Dibdin, or Gilbert W. S.; music may have been by Brahms or Schubert, or Strauss or Wagner or Debussy, but critics of Leading Morning Journal seem to think by none of these.

"'Core!" roared the cads in the stalls.

"'Core!" yelled the bloods in the pit.

"'Core!" cried the young ladies in the dress circle.

"'Core!" roared the member of nature's nobility all over the house.

"Right on the spot all the time," said the Chairman of the Syndicate. "Hollins, have that five years' contract put in hand at once."

"Aye, aye, sir," said Hollins, forgetting the degree to which it had pleased providence to call him in the lilt of that nautical tune.

"Good on yer, Mary," proclaimed outspoken youth with almost pathetic enthusiasm from the front row of the gods. At the end of the twenty-fourth verse Mr. Lover presented a bouquet of lilies of the valley, smilax and maidenhair fern to this national heroine. Paid for by the management, saith young friend of the Standard