with the high kicking, and all gone off,
except one girl, a gipsy, who was going to sing a song, and then a bell
would ring and the whole stage effects would change as if by magic. When
she had got to the end of her song and had waltzed off to the left, we
got up and walked down in front, and took one of a whole row of vacant
seats, put on our spectacles, and were ready. Do you know, every cuss in
that audience saw us go down there? They all thought we had gone there
to be nearer the dizzy tights, and they began to clap their hands and
cheer. We think Chapin, the lawyer, who doesn't like us very well,
started it, and every kid in the gallery took it up, and the house
fairly rung with applause at the sight of our bald head well down in
front. We never felt so mean since we quit stealing sheep.

The crowd laughed and hi-hi'd, and the stage manager took the applause
for an _encore_, and ordered the girl to go out and sing some more. She
knew better, knew they were guying the bald-headed man in front, and all
the troupe knew it, and the girls put their heads out from the wings and
laughed; but the girl came out and sung again. If she didn't wink at us
when she came out, then we don't know what a wink is, and we have been
around some, too.

She sang some confounded love song, such as "Darling, Kiss My Eye
Winkers Down," or "Hold the Fort," or something, and kept looking at us
every moment, and smiling like a church sociable. The crowd took it all
in, too. Her dress was cut decolette, or low necked at the bottom, and
we were nearer to the angelic choir than a bald headed man of family
ever ought to be, but there was no help for it. She was the only girl
in the troupe that wore black tights, and we thanked our stars for that,
but even with all those mitigating circumstances in our favor the affair
had a bad look, and we admit it. Of course any one would know that we
wouldn't go out of our way to see any black stockings, but it looked as
though we had, to the crowd.

We have faced death on many a field of carnage, but we never knew what
it was to want to be away from a place quite so much as then. If you
know how a man feels when he is stricken with paralysis, or a piece of
a brick house, you can imagine something about it. We tried to put on a
pious look, a deaconish sort of expression, like a man who is passing
a collection plate in church, but the blushes on our face did not look
deaconish at all. We tried to look far away