belonging to Ma, with flounces
and things on, and put them on so they came most down to our knees,
and we put sheets over us, clear to our feet, and when Hamlet got to
yearning for his father's ghost, I came in out of the bath room with the
sheet over me, and said I was the huckleberry he was looking for, and my
chum followed me out and said he was a twin ghost, also, and then Hamlet
got on his ear and said he wouldn't play with two ghosts, and he went
off pouting, and then my chum and me pulled off the sheets and danced a
clog dance. Well, when the rest of the troop saw our make up, it nearly
killed them. Most of them had seen ballet dancers, but they never saw
them with different colored socks. The minister said the benefit was
rapidly becoming a farce, and before we had danced half a minute Ma she
recognized her socks, and she came for me with a hot box, and made me
take them off, and Pa was mad and said the dancing was the only thing
that was worth the price of admission, and he scolded Ma, and the choir
girls sided with Pa, and just then my chum caught his toe in the carpet
and fell down, and that loosened the plaster overhead and about a
bushel fell on the crowd. Pa thought lightning had struck the house, the
minister thought it was a judgment on them all for play acting, and he
began to shed his Hamlet costume with one hand and pick the plaster
out of his hair with the other. The women screamed and tried to get
the plaster out of their necks, and while Pa was brushing off the choir
singers Ma said the rehearsal was adjourned, and they all went home,
but we are going to rehearse again on Friday night. The play cannot be
considered a success, but we will bring it out all right by the time the
entertainment is to come off."

"By gum," said the grocery man, "I would like to have seen that minister
as Hamlet. Didn't he look funny?"

"Funny! Well, I should remark. He seemed to predominate. That is, he
was too fresh, too numerous, as it were. But at the next rehearsal I am
going to work in an act from Richard the Third, and my chum is going
to play the Chinaman of the Danites, and I guess we will take the cake.
Say, I want to work in an idiot somewhere. How would you like to play
the idiot. You wouldn't have to rehearse or anything--"

At this point the bad boy was seen to go out of the grocery store real
spry, followed by a box of wooden clothes-pins that the grocery man had
thrown after him.

CHAPTER XXIV.