ndages. Drink did not flow plentifully, but there was something to wet
your whistle with, and the tobacco-cloud that hung above the
trestle-benches, packed with black and yellow faces, as well as brown and
white, could almost have been cut with a knife.

It was a long, rambling programme, scrawled in huge, black-paint
characters on a white planed board, hung where everyone could read it.
There were comic songs and Christy Minstrel choruses by people who had
developed vocal talent for this occasion only, and a screaming display of
conjuring tricks by an amateur of legerdemain who had forgotten the art,
if ever he had mastered it. At every new mistake or blunder, and with each
fresh change of expression on the entertainer's streaky face, conveying
the idea of his being under the influence of a bad dream, and hoping to
wake up in his own quarters by-and-by, to find that he had never really
undertaken to make a pudding in a hat, and smash a gentleman's watch and
produce it intact from some unexpected place of concealment, the
spectators rocked and roared. Then there was a Pantomimic Interlude, with
a great deal of genuine knockabout, and, the crowning item of the
entertainment, a comic song and stump-speech, announced to be given by The
Anonymous Mammoth Comique--an incognito not dimly suspected to conceal the
identity of the Chief himself, being delayed by the Mammoth's character
top-hat--a fondly cherished property of the Stiggins brand--and the
cabbage umbrella that went with it, having been accidentally left behind
at the Mammoth's hotel, the Master of the Revels, still distinguished by
the jib-sail collar and shiny burnt-cork complexion of the corner-man, was
sent to the front to ask if any lady or gentleman in the audience would
kindly oblige with a ten-minute turn?

"All right, Mister!"

A soiled cotton glove waved, a flowery hat nodded to the appeal from
behind the acetylene footlights. The faces in the front rows of seats,
pale and brick-dust, gingerbread and cigar-browned European, African
countenances with rolling eyes and shining teeth; and here and there the
impassive, almond-eyed, yellow mask of the Asiatic, slewed round as
Emigration Jane rose up in the place beside W. Keyse, a little pale, and
with damp patches in the palms of the washed white cotton gloves, as she
said: If the gentleman pleased, she could sing--just a little!

No, thank you! She wasn't afryde, not she; they was all friends there. And
do