eatre they have properly christened the pit, and
this morning it looked like the bottomless one.

"Lor'-a-massey! Ever see the inside of a theatre in the daytime? Of
course you've not, my dears. It is what the world itself was the day
before the first day--without form and void, and darkness is on the face
of the deep. Not a ray of daylight anywhere, except the adulterated kind
that comes mooching round corridors and prowling in at half-open doors,
and floating through the sepulchral gloom like the sleepy eyes of the
monsters that terrified me in the caves at Gob-ny-Deigan when I used to
play pirate, you remember.

"The gentlemen had left me alone on the stage with five or six
footlights--which they ought to call face-lights--flashing in my eyes,
and when the pianist began to vamp and I to sing it was like pitching my
voice into a tunnel, and I became so dreadfully nervous that I was forced
to laugh. That seemed to vex my unseen audience, who thought me 'rot'; so
I said, 'Let there be more light then.' and there was more light, 'and
let the piano cease from troubling,' and it was so. Then I just stiffened
my back and gave them one of mother's French songs, and after the first
verse I called out to the manager at the back," Can you hear me?' and he
called back, 'Go on; it's splendid!' So I did 'Mylecharaine' in the Manx,
and I suppose I acted both of my songs; but I was only beginning to be
aware that my voice in that great place was a little less like a
barrel-organ than usual when suddenly there came a terrific clatter, such
as comes with the seventh wave on the shingle, and my two dear men in the
dark were clapping the skin of their hands off!

"Oh, my dears! my dears! If you only knew how for weeks and weeks I had
been moaning and lamenting that it was because I wasn't clever that
people took no notice of me, you would forgive a vain creature when she
said to herself, 'My daughter, you are really somebody, after all--you,
you, you!' It was a beautiful moment, though, and when the old mushroom
came back to the stage saying: 'What a voice! What expression! What
nature!' I felt like falling on his bald head and kissing it, not being
able to speak for lumps in the throat and feeling like the Methodist lady
who poured out whisky for the class leaders after they had presented her
with a watch, and then told the reporters to say she had suitably
responded.

"Heigho! I have talked about the fashionable people I meet in Lo