t she had come off victor
and in every instance had done so by the sheer power of what she, with
fair accuracy, called nonsense. So now they were ready to see her, at
any juncture the twins or accident might spring, show the same method
and win an even more lustrous triumph in keeping with her own
metamorphosis. Nay, they were more than ready to lend a hand toward such
an outcome. Like Watson, they had sentimentally matched Hugh and Ramsey,
prospectively, in their desire, and saw that such a union must sooner or
later be, if it was not already, a paramount issue in the strife. In
such expectancy sat the throng, keenly aware of the twins at their front
and Hugh at their back, as Ramsey's indrawn breath began to return in
song, its first notes as low as her voice could sink, its time slow, its
verbal inflections those of the freight-deck negro:

"Do you belong toe Gideon's ban'?"

So far it got before it was drowned in a deluge of laughter and
applause. She had made, as Gilmore said to his wife behind the curtain,
a "ten-strike." Her hearers did not pause an instant to determine
whether the utterance was wit or humor or pure inanity. It fitted their
mood; fitted it better than the actor or Hugh had believed it could. To
the company's notion it was good nonsense offsetting and overpowering an
otherwise invincible bad nonsense and snatching from it all right of
argument, sympathy, or judicial appeal; laughing it out of court, to
remain out at least until the completion of this voyage should give this
jury, these hearers, an honorable discharge. The shrewd good sense of
it, in their judgment, was the most fun of all, and while in her heart
Ramsey was gratefully giving the credit of that to the actor and Hugh,
the people naturally gave it to her and laughed and clapped and pounded
again on second thought.

Now abruptly they hushed and let her resume:

"Do you belong toe Gideon's ban'?
Here's my heart an' here's my han'.
Do you belong toe Gideon's ban'?
Fight'n faw yo' home!"

Again the audience broke in.

"Fighting for your home!" they laughed to one another as they clapped.
Home was the catchword of the times. Jenny Lind was singing nightly:

"Midt bleasures undt balacess----"

and three fourths of all the songs not of the opera were of home and its
ties. What the word might exactly signify in this case made little
matter; on her lips, from her breast, it meant human kindness, mai