ew Americans can do it. I read my lines with intelligence, but gave
no sign of what I intended to do at night. Of course that made Mr. Daly
suffer great anxiety, but he said nothing, only looked at me with such
troubled, anxious eyes that I felt sorry for him. One gentleman, however,
decided that I was--not to put too fine a point upon it--"a lunk-head."
He treated me with supercilious condescension, varied occasionally with
overbearing tyranny. Just one person in the theatre knew that I was
really a good actress, of considerable experience, and that was James
Lewis; and from a tricksy spirit of mischief he kept the silence of a
graven image, and when Mr. Dan Harkins took me aside to teach me to act,
Lewis would retire to a quiet spot and writhe with suppressed laughter.

One day he said to me: "Say, you ain't cooking up a huge joke on these
gas-balloons, are you, Clara? And upon my soul you are doing it well--you
act as green as a cucumber."

And never did I succeed in convincing him that I had not engineered a
great joke on the company by deceptive rehearsing. One tiny incident
seemed to give Mr. Daly a touch of confidence in me. In the "Inn scene" a
violent storm was raging, and at a critical moment the candle was
supposed to be blown out by a gust of wind from the left door, as one of
the characters entered. They were using a mechanical device for
extinguishing the candle, and it was tried several times one morning, and
always, to my surprise, from the _right_ side of the stage. No one seemed
to notice anything odd, though the flame streamed out good and long in
the wrong direction before going out. At last I ventured, as I was the
principal in the scene: "I beg your pardon, gentlemen, but is it not the
wind from the open door that blows that light out?"

Then, quick and sharp, mine enemy was upon me: "This is _our_ affair,
Miss Morris."

"Yes," I answered, "but the house will laugh if the candle goes out
_against_ the storm," and Mr. Daly sprang up, and, smiling his first
kindly smile at me, said: "What the deuce have we all been thinking
of--you're right, the candle must be extinguished from the _left_," and
as I glanced across the stage I saw Lewis doing some neat little dancing
steps all by himself.

The rehearsals were exhausting in the extreme, the heat was unnatural,
the walk far too long, and, well, to be frank, I had not nearly enough to
eat. My anxiety was growing hourly, my strength began to fail, and