I was very
miserable. It is always hateful to disappoint the public, and on this
occasion I was compelled to break faith where I most wished to keep it.
I heard afterwards from my daughter (who played some of my parts
instead of me) that many of the Coventry people thought I had never
meant to come at all. If this should meet their eyes, I hope they will
believe that this was not so. My ambition to play at Coventry again
shall be realized yet.[1]

[Footnote 1: Since I wrote this, I have again visited my native
town--this time to receive its civic congratulations on the occasion of
my jubilee, and as recently as March of the present year I acted at the
new Empire Theater.]

At one time nothing seemed more unlikely than that I should be able to
act in another Warwickshire town, a town whose name is known all over
the world. But time and chance and my own great wish succeeded in
bringing about my appearance at Stratford-on-Avon.

I can well imagine that the children of some strolling players used to
have a hard time of it, but my mother was not one to shirk her duties.
She worked hard at her profession and yet found it possible not to
_drag_ up her children, to live or die as it happened, but to bring them
up to be healthy, happy, and wise--theater-wise, at any rate. When her
babies were too small to be left at the lodgings (which she and my
father took in each town they visited as near to the theater as
possible), she would bundle us up in a shawl and put us to sleep in her
dressing-room. So it was, that long before I spoke in a theater, I slept
in one.

Later on, when we were older and mother could leave us at home, there
was a fire one night at our lodgings, and she rushed out of the theater
and up the street in an agony of terror. She got us out of the house all
right, took us to the theater, and went on with the next act as if
nothing had happened. Such fortitude is commoner in our profession, I
think, than in any other. We "go on with the next act" whatever
happens, and if we know our business, no one in the audience will ever
guess that anything is wrong--that since the curtain last went down some
dear friend has died, or our children in the theatrical lodgings up the
street have run the risk of being burnt to death.

My mother had eleven children altogether, but only nine survived their
infancy, and of these nine, my eldest brother, Ben, and my sister
Florence have since died. My sister Kate, who left the st