something--I don't know what."

Merton Gill passed on. He confessed now to a reluctant admiration for
the Montague girl. She could surely throw a knife. He must practise that
himself sometime. He might have stayed to see more of this drama but he
was afraid the girl would break out into more of her nonsense. He was
aware that she swept him with her eyes as he turned away but he
evaded her glance. She was not a person, he thought, that one ought to
encourage.

He emerged from the great building and crossed an alley to another of
like size. Down toward its middle was the usual wall of canvas with
half-a-dozen men about the opening at one corner. A curious whirring
noise came from within. He became an inconspicuous unit of the group and
gazed in. The lights were on, revealing a long table elaborately set
as for a banquet, but the guests who stood about gave him instant
uneasiness. They were in the grossest caricatures of evening dress, both
men and women, and they were not beautiful. The gowns of the women
were grotesque and the men were lawless appearing, either as to hair or
beards or both. He divined the dreadful thing he was stumbling upon
even before he noted the sign in large letters on the back of a folding
chair: "Jeff Baird's Buckeye Comedies." These were the buffoons who with
their coarse pantomime, their heavy horse-play, did so much to debase
a great art. There, even at his side, was the arch offender, none other
than Jeff Baird himself, the man whose regrettable sense of so-called
humour led him to make these low appeals to the witless. And even as
he looked the cross-eyed man entered the scene. Garbed in the weirdly
misfitting clothes of a waiter, holding aloft a loaded tray of dishes,
he entered on roller skates, to halt before Baird with his uplifted tray
at a precarious balance.

"All right, that's better," said Baird. "And, Gertie, listen: don't
throw the chair in front of him. That's out. Now we'll have the entrance
again. You other boys on the rollers, there--" Three other basely comic
waiters on roller skates came to attention.

"Follow him in and pile up on him when he makes the grand spill--see
what I mean? Get your trays loaded now and get off. Now you other
people, take your seats. No, no, Annie, you're at the head, I told you.
Tom, you're at the foot and start the rough-house when you get the tray
in the neck. Now, all set."

Merton Gill was about to leave this distressing scene but was held