Hattie, Annie, and Clara there was
added Mary. And lo! in this young woman I recognized a friend of my
youth. I had known her but two days, but I could never forget the only
child I had ever had a play with. She had parted from me in wrath
because, after playing house-keeping all morning in the yard, I had
refused to eat a clay dumpling she had made, with a nice green
clover-leaf in its middle. She threw the dumpling at me, roaring like a
little bull calf, and twisting a dirty small fist into each dry eye, she
waddled off home, leaving me, finger in mouth, gazing in pained amazement
after her, until my fat little legs suddenly gave way, as was their wont
in moments of great emotion, and sat me unwillingly but flatly down upon
the ground, where I remained, looking gravely at them and wondering what
they did it for--and now here we were together again.

Of course this playing of many parts was, in a certain way, an advantage
to me, and I appreciated it; but there can be too much even of a good
thing. That I got little pay for all this work was nothing to me, I was
glad to do it for the experience it gave me, but when I was forced to
appear ridiculous through my inability to dress the parts correctly I
suffered cruelly. Once in a while, as in the case of _King Charles_, I
could get a costume from the theatre wardrobe, where the yellow plush
breeches lived when not engaged in desolating my young life, but, alas!
here, as everywhere, the man is the favored party, and the theatre
wardrobe contains only masculine garments; the women must provide
everything for themselves. Then, too, one is never too young or too
insignificant to feel an injustice.

I recall, very distinctly, having to go on for _Lady Anne_ in "Richard
III.," with a rather unimportant star. Now had I "held a position," as
the term goes, that part would, out of courtesy, have belonged to me for
the rest of the season, unless I chose to offer it back to the woman I
had obliged; but being only a ballet-girl I did well enough for the _Lady
Anne_ of an unimportant star, but when a more popular _Richard_ appeared
upon the scene, _Lady Anne_ was immediately reclaimed, and I traipsed
again behind the coffin, and with the rest of the ballet was witness to
that most savage fling of Shakespeare against a vain, inconsequential
womanhood as personified in _Lady Anne_, who, standing by her coffined,
murdered dead, eagerly drinks in the flattery offered by the murderer's
sel