-room door to see--what? Merely a child in a
tantrum, a heap of rags on the floor, a little girl in white petticoats
stamping, dancing, pulling away from an old Italian woman who was trying
to robe her and exhorting, imploring, threatening the child in almost
one and the same breath.

The manager rushed to the rescue for the house was losing its head. He
seized the child by the arm. "What's the matter here, Aileen?"

"I ain't goin' ter dance a coon ter-night--not ter-night!" she cried
defiantly and in intense excitement; "he's in the box again, an' I'm
goin' to give him the Sunday-night song, like as I did before when he
give me the flowers, so now!"

Nonna Lisa, the old Italian, slipped the white dress deftly over the
mutinous head, so muffling the half-shriek. The manager laughed. "Hurry
up then--on with you!" The child sprang away with a bound. "I've seen
this too many times before," he added; "it's an attack of 'the last
night's nerves.'--Hark!"

The tumult was drowning the last notes of the orchestral intermezzo, as
the little girl, clad now wholly in white, ran in upon the stage and
coming again down the centre raised her hand as if to command silence.
With the gallery to see was to obey; the floor and balconies having
subsided the applause from above died away.

The child, standing in the full glare of the footlights with the sunny
skyey spaces and overlapping blue hills behind her, half-faced the
brilliant house as, without accompaniment, she began to sing:

"There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall."

The childish voice sustained the simple melody perfectly, and it was
evident when the little girl began the second verse that she was singing
wholly to please herself and some one in a proscenium box. Before the
close of the first stanza the gallery experienced a turn, the audience
as a whole a sensation. Night after night the gallery gods had made it a
point to be present at that hour of the continuous performance when the
Little Patti--such was the name on the poster--sang either her famous
Irish song "Oh, the praties they are small", or "The Holy City", and
followed them by a coon dance the like of which was not to be seen
elsewhere in New York; for into it the child threw such an abandonment
of enthusiasm that she carried herself and her audience to the verge of
extravagance--the one in action, the other in expression.

And now this!

A woman sobbed outright at the close of the s