wn the stairs from our
dressing-rooms to go home--the theater was quiet and deserted--we found
a small child sitting forlornly and patiently on the lowest step.

"Well, my dear, what are you doing here?" said Henry.

"Waiting for mother, sir."

"Are you acting in the theater?"

"Yes, sir."

"And what part do you take?"

"Please, sir, first I'm a water-carrier, then I'm a little page, and
then I'm a virgin."

Henry and I sat down on the stairs and laughed until we cried! Little
Flo Holland was one of the troop of "virgins" who came to wake Juliet on
her bridal morn. As time went on she was promoted to more important
parts, but she never made us laugh so much again.

Her mother was a "character," a dear character. She had an
extraordinarily open mind, and was ready to grasp each new play as it
came along as a separate and entirely different field of operations! She
was also extremely methodical, and only got flurried once in a blue
moon. When we went to America and made the acquaintance of that dreadful
thing, a "one-night stand," she was as precise and particular about
having everything nice and in order for me as if we were going to stay
in the town a month. Down went my neat square of white drugget; all the
lights in my dressing-room were arranged as I wished. Everything was
unpacked and ironed. One day when I came into some American theater to
dress I found Sally nearly in tears.

"What's the matter with you, Sally?" I asked.

"I 'aven't 'ad a morsel to heat all day, dear, and I can't 'eat my
iron."

"Eat your iron, Sally! What _do_ you mean?"

"'Ow am I to iron all this, dear?" wailed Sally, picking up my Nance
Oldfield apron and a few other trifles. "It won't get 'ot."

Until then I really thought that Sally was being sardonic about an iron
as a substitute for victuals!

When she first began to dress me, I was very thin, so thin that it was
really a grief to me. Sally would comfort me in my thin days by the
terse compliment:

"Beautiful and fat to-night, dear."

As the years went on and I grew fat, she made a change in the
compliment:

"Beautiful and thin to-night, dear."

Mr. Fernandez played Friar Laurence in "Romeo and Juliet." He was a very
nervous actor, and it used to paralyze him with fright when I knelt down
in the friar's cell with my back to the audience and put safety pins in
the drapery I wore over my head to keep it in position while I said the
lines,

"Are you at leisure,