short ones. Mr.
Chute took me in hand, and I had to wake up and be alert with brains
and body. The first part I played was Cupid in "Endymion." To this day I
can remember my lines. I entered as a blind old woman in what is known
in theatrical parlance as a "disguise cloak." Then, throwing it off, I
said:

"Pity the poor blind--what no one here?
Nay then, I'm not so blind as I appear,
And so to throw off all disguise and sham,
Let me at once inform you who I am!
I'm Cupid!"

Henrietta Hodson as Endymion and Kate as Diana had a dance with me which
used to bring down the house. I wore a short tunic which in those days
was considered too scanty to be quite nice, and carried the conventional
bow and quiver.

In another burlesque, "Perseus and Andromeda," I played Dictys; it was
in this piece that Arthur Wood used to make people laugh by punning on
the line: "Such a mystery (Miss Terry) here!" It was an absurd little
joke, but the people used to cheer and applaud.

At the end of my first season at Bristol I returned to London for a time
to play at the Haymarket under Mr. Buckstone, but I had another season
at Bristol in the following year. While my stage education was
progressing apace, I was, through the influence of a very wonderful
family whose acquaintance we made, having my eyes opened to beautiful
things in art and literature. Mr. Godwin, the architect and
archaeologist, was living in Bristol when Kate and I were at the Theater
Royal, and we used to go to his house for some of the Shakespeare
readings in which our Bristol friends asked us to take part. This house,
with its Persian rugs, beautiful furniture, its organ, which for the
first time I learned to love, its sense of design in every detail, was a
revelation to me, and the talk of its master and mistress made me
_think_. At the theater I was living in an atmosphere which was
developing my powers as an actress and teaching me what work meant, but
my mind had begun to grasp dimly and almost unconsciously that I must do
something for myself--something that all the education and training I
was receiving in my profession could not do for me. I was fourteen years
old at Bristol, but I now felt that I had never really lived at all
before. For the first time I began to appreciate beauty, to observe, to
feel the splendor of things, to _aspire_!

I remember that in one of the local papers there had appeared under the
headline "Jottings" some very