itted out as a private stateroom for
Emily.

"From that time on, for quite a spell, we're just the same as one big
happy family, as we goes a-jauntily touring from place to place.

"We're playin' the Big Time, which means week stands and no hard jumps.
Emily's a hit, a knock-out and a riot wherever she appears. She knows it
too, but success don't go to her head, and she don't never get no
attacks of this here complaint which they calls temper'ment. I always
figgered out that temper'ment, when a grand wopra singster has it, is
just plain old temper when it afflicts a bricklayer. I don't know what
form it would take if it should seize on a bull, but Emily appears to be
absolutely immune. Give her a ton of hay and one sack of peanuts a day,
and she's just as placid as a great gross of guinea pigs. Behind the
scenes she never makes no trouble, but chums with the stage-hands and
even sometimes with the actors, thus proving that she ain't stuck up.

"When the time comes for Emily to do her turn, she just goes ambling on
behind Windy and cuts up more didoes than any trick-mule that ever
lived. She smokes a pipe, and she toots on a brass horn, and waits on
table while Windy pretends to eat, and stands on her head, and plays
baseball with him and so forth and so on, for fifteen minutes, winding
up by waving the Amurikin flag over her head. But all this time she's
keeping one eye on me, where I'm standing in the wings with a sack of
peanuts in my pocket waiting for her to come off. Every time she works
over toward my side of the stage, she makes little hoydenish remarks to
me in her native language. It ain't long until I can make out everything
she says. I've been pedling the bull too long not to be able to
understand it when spoke by a native.

"For upwards of two months things goes along just beautiful. Then we
strikes a town out in Illinois where business ain't what it used to be,
if indeed it ever was. Along about the middle of the week the young
feller that's doing the press-work for the house comes to me and asks me
if I ain't got an idea in my system that might make a good press-stunt.

"There's an inspiration comes to me and I suggests to him that maybe he
might go ahead and make an announcement that following the Saturday
matinee, Emily the Pluperfect, Ponderous, Pachydermical Performer,
direct from the court of the reigning Roger of Simla County, India, will
hold a reception on the stage to meet her little friends,