you must load the lashes with black pomade, then draw a
black line beneath the eye, and a broad line on its upper lid, and a
final line out from the corner. The result will be an added lustre to the
made-up eye, a seeming gain in brilliancy; but now, watching your
reflection all the time, move slowly backward from the glass, and an odd
thing will happen, that made-up eye will gradually grow smaller and
smaller, until, at a distance much less than that of the auditorium, it
will really look more like a round black hole than anything else, and
will be absolutely without expression. You have an admirable stage
eye--an actor's eye, sensitive, expressive, well opened, it's a pity to
spoil it with a load of blacking."

And I said, gratefully: "I'll never do it again, sir," and I never have,
first from respect to a great actor's opinion, and gratitude for his
kindly interest, later having tried his experiment, from the conviction
that he was right, and finally because my tears would have sent inky
rivulets down my cheeks had I indulged in black-banded eyes. So in all
these years of work, just once, in playing a tricky, treacherous,
plotting female, that I felt should be a close-eyed, thin-lipped
creature, I have painted and elongated my eyes, otherwise I have kept my
promise "not to do it again."

I met Mr. Jefferson in Paris at that dreadful time when he was threatened
with blindness, and I never shall forget his gentle patience, his
marvelous courage. That was a day of real rejoicing to me, when the news
came that his sight was saved. Blindness coming upon any man is a horror,
but to a man who can see nature as Joseph Jefferson sees her it would
have been an almost incredible cruelty.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIFTH

I See an Actress Dethroned--I Make Myself a Promise, for the World Does
Move.

To be discarded by the public, that is the _bete noire_, the
unconquerable dread and terror of the actor. To fail in the great
struggle for supremacy is nothing compared to the agony of falling after
the height has once been won.

Few people can think of the infamous casting down of the great column
Vendome without a shiver of pain--the smashing of the memorial tablet,
the shattering of the statue, these are sights to shrink from, yet what
does such shrinking amount to when compared to the pain of seeing a human
being thrust from the sunlight of public popularity into the darkness of
obscurity?

I was witness once to the d