ould make fun of me at the theatre.
At the box-office window that day many people were asking: "That girl
that made the hit last night, is she really one of the ballet, or is it
just a story, for effect?"

Some women asked, anxiously: "Will that girl cry to-night, do you think?"

It was very strange. One paper had a quieter article; it spoke of a rough
diamond--of an earnest, honest method of addressing speeches directly to
the character, instead of to the audience, as did many of the older
actors. It claimed a future, a fair, bright future for the girl who could
so thoroughly put herself in another's place, and declared it would watch
with interest the movements of so remarkable a ballet-girl.

Now see how oddly we human dice are shaken about, and in what groups we
fall, again and again. Among the honorable gentlemen sitting at that time
in the Ohio Legislature was Colonel Donn Piatt, with the fever of the
Southern marshes yet in his blood as a souvenir of his services through
the war. He had gone languidly enough to the theatre that night, because
there was nothing else for him to do--unless he swapped stories of the
war in the hotel corridor with other ex-soldiers, and he was sick to
death of that, and he was so surprised by what he saw that he was moved
to write the article from which the last quotation is taken. Stopping in
the same hotel, but quite unknown to him, was a young man, hardly out of
boyhood, whose only lie, I honestly believe, was the one he told and
swore to in order to raise his age to the proper military height that
would admit him into the army. Bright, energetic, almost attaining
perpetual motion in his own person, ambitious John A. Cockerill just then
served in the double capacity of a messenger in the House and reporter on
a paper. Diphtheria, which was almost epidemic that winter, visited the
staff of the paper he was on, and in consequence he was temporarily
assigned to its dramatic work--thus he wrote another of the notices of my
first venture in the tearful drama. Every day these two men were in the
State-house--every day I walked through its grounds on my way to and from
the theater--each quite unconscious of the others.

But old Time shakes the box and casts the dice so many, many times,
groupings must repeat themselves now and again, so it came about that
after years filled with hard work and fair dreams, another shake of the
box cast us down upon the table of Life, grouped together aga