and that is what made me
do it. This is how I felt. I looked down at the seats of honor
reserved for the Byrdsville distinguished citizens, and saw my father
sitting in one of the high places, as it were, between Judge Luttrell
and Mr. Chadwell, and his face was just beaming with enjoyment of the
way all those other men's sons and daughters were distinguishing
themselves with their beauty and talent. And then out in the audience
Judge Luttrell had Tony's mother, dressed in lovely black silk and
also full of pride, while Mr. Chadwell kept nodding to Pink's mother
at everything that Pink did, like there never had been a negro
minstrel before. I thought of Father being the only lonely one up on
the platform and with only me to be a credit to him--and me not doing
it. I prayed for an immediate plan and as I prayed, as is my custom, I
acted. I asked Mr. Douglass Byrd quick, if there was time for me to do
an impersonation, and he answered with the most wonderfully
encouraging smile:

"Go ahead, Miss Phyllis, and you can heat them all."

Now, the only person in the world I could ever be like is my own self,
or Father himself, and as I sat and looked at him the idea came. Last
year the governess took me to hear Father make a speech when he
presented a library building to the college from which he graduated.
It was such a fine one and full of so much humor and pathos, as all
speeches should be to hold the attention of an audience, that it was
published in all the papers in New York, and I learned it by heart
from pride over it. That was what I impersonated--my own father with
him looking on!

All the others had had costumes and burnt cork and things to help
them; but I had on a pink flowered organdie and pink slippers with a
huge pink bow on my head, and my looks were all dead against my
success. But I did succeed! I knew I would when I took my stand and
looked down into Father's surprised and alarmed face. I shrugged my
shoulders in my dress just as he did in his dress coat, dropped my
head on one side, and pursed my mouth up on the left corner and let my
right eye droop as his does. Then I began--and for that five minutes I
_was_ Father. The speech just rolled off my eloquent tongue and
the people laughed in the right places, just as the people at the
college did, and the Colonel blew his nose like a trumpet when I said
the short sentences about the memorial table to be put in the hallway
to the "fellows who have gone," wh