r to the presence of his employer, with a name hard to pronounce;
and in the last act, when the star had become the boss of the whole
affair, could announce the coming of his carriage.

"Could I do those two lines?"

"Oh, yes!" I joyfully announced my ability and my willingness; "but I had
no clothes."

And then, instead of turning the part into a girl attendant, in an evil
moment the manager bethought himself of some wardrobe he had purchased
from a broken up or down opera manager, and search discovered the
yellow-plush breeches, coat, and white wig. I put them on--the canary was
hatched!

I played the part of two announcements; I walked out clear from the hip,
like a boy--and I became the utility man of the company, and the
tormented victim of the yellow breeches.

I was a patient young person and willing to endure much for art's sake,
but that wig was too much. Built of white horse-hair mounted upon linen,
its heat and weight were fearful. It had evidently been constructed for a
big, round, perfectly bumpless head. It came down to my very eyebrows on
top, and at the sides, instead of terminating just at the hair-line above
the ear, it swallowed up my ears, covered my temples, and extended clear
to my eyes, giving me the appearance of being harnessed up in large white
blinders--like a shying horse. In common humanity the manager released me
from the wig and let me wear powder, but the clutch of the yellow
breeches remained unbroken.

As in their opera days (I don't know what they sang, but they were
probably in the chorus) they had wandered through the world, knowing all
continental Europe and the South Americas, so now they wandered through
dramatic literature. One night accompanying me on to deliver a note to
Madame de Pompadour, the next night those same yellow breeches and I
skipped back to Louis XIV., and admitted many lords and ladies, with
tongue-tying names, to that monarch's presence, only to skip forward
again, in a few days, to bring in mail-bags to snuffy rural gentry, under
almost any of the Georges. Though the lace ruffles and jabots of the
French period might give place to a plain red waistcoat for the Georgian
English household, the canary breeches were always there, ready to burst
into song at any moment, to basely fire off a button or break a buckle
just at the moment of my entrance-cue, treacherously suggesting, by their
easy wrinkling while I stood, that I might just as well sit down and rest