y!" "Kill it, Kid!" "Whatcha know about dat!"
"Sand it down, Barnesy!" The old-timer was doing the famous lock-step
jig he had done with Pat Rooney in "Patrice" fifteen or twenty years
before. It was so old that it was new. Encore followed encore. The
perspiration cascaded through his pores; he grinned and winked and
frisked and capered. They would not let him stop. At the end of
twenty-five minutes he bowed himself off the stage, and still they
called him back. When he gave them, for the "call," the Little Johnny
Dugan pantomime from "The Rainmakers," the East Side children, born
since the day of such things, were suffocated with delight.

What did Dugan do to him?
--They say he was untrue to him.
Did Dugan owe him money?
--No; he stole McCarthy's wife!
Who? Little Johnny Dugan?

sang Barnes with a quizzical flirt of his head; and lungs that were wont
to fill the city streets with news could not even gasp for laughter.

The secretary of the organization followed with a speech about future
entertainments; another official read a letter from a prominent
financier promising the boys a swimming-pool and a half dozen summer
excursions.

"Somebody bang de box!" suggested a voice, after a pause.

Nobody could--except Barnes; and he volunteered. The whole affair was
now like one big family circle, each one secure in the amity of the
other, and when the old man sat down at the cracked piano, he sang as if
he were singing to himself, easily and without restraint. A quiet held
the house, and even the children were touched; for Harry Barnes was
quavering through the simple lines of "Should Auld Acquaintance Be
Forgot." After that he gave them the Lullaby Song from "Erminie," and
somehow it did not at all appear incongruous that a careworn mimic of
fifty should be singing to careworn workingmen of ten, down on the
Bowery, in a gymnasium, a verse about pretty little eyelids and sleeping
darlings. The world, fortunately, is not always with us; and the song
ended in a silent applause.

For two hours the entertainment went on, speeches and official plans
interspersed with the antics of Barnes.

[Illustration: "'OH, YOU DIVVIL, YOU! YOU OLD, BLATHERSKITING DIVVIL'"]

Was there anything he could not do? He mimicked birds and animals; he
imitated a wheezy phonograph playing "When We Were a Couple of Kids"; he
recited "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride"; he gave a cutting from
Dickens and one from Sheridan K