ary to go to sleep when
you're playing a listening role, but don't snore!... Oh, you're a
swell actor! Think of me swallering your story about having been t'
college!... Don't make up your eyebrows so heavy, you fool.... Why you
ever wanted to be an actor----!"

The Great Riley agreed with all that Heye said, and marveled with Heye
that he had ever tried an amateur. Carl found the dressing-room a
hay-dusty hell. But he enjoyed acting in "The Widow's Penny," "Alabama
Nell," "The Moonshiner's Daughter," and "The Crook's Revenge" far more
than he had enjoyed picking phrases out of Shakespeare at a vaguely
remembered Plato. Since, in Joralemon and Plato, he had been brought
up on melodrama, he believed as much as did the audience in the plays.
It was a real mountain cabin from which he fired wonderfully loud guns
in "The Moonshiner's Daughter"; and when the old mountaineer cried,
"They ain't going to steal mah gal!" Carl was damp at the eyes, and
swore with real fervor the oath to protect the girl, sure that in the
ravine behind the back-drop his bearded foe-men were lurking.

"The Crook's Revenge" was his favorite, for he was cast as a young
millionaire and wore evening clothes (second-hand). He held off a mob
of shrieking gangsters, crouched behind an overturned table in a
gambling-den. He coolly stroked the lovely hair of the ingenue, Miss
Evelyn L'Ewysse, with one hand, leveled a revolver with the other, and
made fearless jests the while, to the infinite excitement of the
audience, especially of the hyah-hyah-hyahing negroes, whose faces,
under the flicker of lowered calcium-carbide lights, made a segregated
strip of yellow-black polka-dotted with white eye-balls.

When the people were before him, respectful to art under canvas, Carl
could love them; but even the tiniest ragged-breeched darky was bold
in his curiosity about the strolling players when they appeared
outside, and Carl was self-conscious about the giggles and stares that
surrounded him when he stopped on the street or went into a drug-store
for the comfortable solace of a banana split. He was in a rage
whenever a well-dressed girl peeped at him amusedly from a one-lunged
runabout. The staring so flustered him that even the pride of coming
from Chicago and knowing about motors did not prevent his feeling
feeble at the knees as he tried to stalk by the grinning motored
aristocracy. He would return to the show-tent, to hate the few tawdry
drops and flats--t