powerful creative fancy of childhood
he should also retain a touch of its petulance and self-consciousness.
Thus to many actors Mr. Barrett's greatness is lost sight of in the
memory of some dogmatic utterance or sharp reproval that wounded
self-love.

It would seem like presumption for me to offer any word of praise for the
artistic work of his later years; the world remembers it; the world
knows, too, how high he climbed, how secure was his position; but twice I
have heard the stories of his earlier years--some from the lips of his
brave wife, once from the lips of that beloved brother Joe, who was yet
his dread and sorrow--and at each telling my throat ached at the pain of
it, while my nerves thrilled with admiration for such endurance, such
splendid determination.

A paradox is, I believe, something seemingly absurd, yet true in fact. In
that case I was not so very far wrong, in spite of general laughter,
when, after my first rehearsal with him, I termed Mr. Barrett a man of
cold enthusiasm. "But," one cried to me, "you stupid--that's a paradox!
don't you see your words contradict each other?"

"Well," I answered, with shame-faced obstinacy, "perhaps they do, but
they are not contradicted by _him_. You all call him icy-cold, and _I_
know he is truly enthusiastic over the possibilities of this play, so
that makes what I call cold enthusiasm, however par-a-paradoxy (?) _it_
sounds."

And now, after all the years, I can approve that childish judgment. He
was a man whose intellectual enthusiasm was backed by a cold
determination that would never let him say "die" while he had breath in
his body and a stage to rehearse on.

I have a miserable memory for names, and often in the middle of a remark
the name I intended to mention will pass from my remembrance utterly; so,
all my life, I have had the very bad habit of trying to make my hearers
understand whom I meant by imitating or mentioning some trait peculiar to
the nameless one, and I generally succeeded.

As, for instance, when I wished to tell whom I had seen taking away a
certain book, I said: "It was Mr.--er--er, oh, you know, Mr.--er, why
this man," and I pulled in my head like a turtle and hitched up my
shoulders to my ears, and the anxious owner cried: "Oh, Thompson has it,
has he?" Thompson having, so far as _we_ could see, no neck at all--my
pantomime suggested his name.

Everyone can recall the enormous brow of Mr. Barrett, and how beneath his
great,