ady Macbeth said, 'Out damned spot,' Pa woke
up and felt the gob of watermelon on his face and he thought he had been
murdered, and Ma came in on a hop, skip and jump as 'Parthenia,' and
threw her arms around a deacon who was going to play the grave digger,
and began to call him pet names, and Pa was mad, and the choir singers
they began to sing, 'In the North Sea lived a whale,' and then they quit
acting. You'd a dide to see Hamlet. The piece of watermelon went down
his neck, and Lady Macbeth went off and left it in the wound under his
collar, and Ma had to pull it out, and Hamlet said the seeds and the
juice was running down inside his shirt, and he said he wouldn't play if
he was going to be stabbed with a slice of melon, so while his wife was
getting the melon seeds out of his neck, and drying the juice on his
shirt, I sharpened a cucumber for Lady Macbeth to use as a dagger, but
Hamlet kicked on cucumbers, too, and I had more trouble than any stage
manager ever had. Then Pa wanted to rehearse the drunken scene in Rip
Van Winkle, where he hugs Grechten and drinks out of a flask behind
her back, and he got one of the choir singers to act as Grechten, and I
guess he would have been hugging till this time, and have swallowed
the flask if Ma had not taken him by the ear, and said a little of that
would go a good ways in an entertainment for the church. Pa said he
didn't know as it was any worse than her prancing up to a grave digger
and hugging him till the filling came out of his teeth, and then the
minister decided that we wouldn't have any hugging at all in the play,
and the choir girls said they wouldn't play, and the old maids struck,
and the play come to a stand still."

"Well, that beats anything I ever heard tell of. It's a shame for
people outside the profession to do play acting, and I won't go to
the entertainment unless I get a pass," said the grocery man. "Did you
rehearse any more?"

"Yes, the minister wanted to try the ghost scene," said the boy, "and
he wanted me to be the ghost. Well, they have two 'Markses' and two
'Topsies' in Uncle Tom's cabin, and I thought two ghosts in Hamlet would
about fill the bill for amateurs, so I got my chum to act as one ghost.
We broke them all up. I wanted to have something new in ghosts, so my
chum and me got two pair of Ma's long stockings, one pair red and one
pair blue, and I put on a red one and a blue one, and my chum did the
same. Then we got some ruffled clothes