or: "What's your
name?"

"Harry Barnes," he said, moistening his lips. Nobody had shown up except
him, he kept thinking over and over to himself: nobody except him. He
had the thankless job of "opening the show."

"... Harry Barnes," echoed the speaker at the end of some sort of
practical talk concerning the newsboys' organization and its management.
"Mister Harry Barnes"--he squinted at the program--"in singing and
talking."

He turned and smiled at the old man, and to Barnes the smile seemed
diabolical. Somebody clapped him on the back. There was a hurricane of
whistles and shouts, and before he knew it he was in the middle of the
rostrum.

Mechanically he had made his old comic entrance, tripping his right toe
over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy.
The boys, determined to be pleased, giggled appreciatively.

"How--how are you, boys?" Barnes asked, seriously.

The audience snickered with delight. He was such a funny-looking old
man!

"I hope you'll like my work," he went on, desperately, "or else we might
as well go home. I guess I'm the whole show, for a little while, at
least, as the feller said when he fell out o' the balloon." The house
roared with approval.

"Go wan, Barnesy," shouted a young pair of lungs in the front row.

He straightened up, turned his back for a moment, stuck a queer set of
mustaches on his upper lip, faced the crowd again, and began: "I was
walkin' down the street the other day when my friend J. Pierpoint Morgan
stepped up to me an' says, 'Barney, my boy'"....

The show had begun. Harry Barnes, singing and talking, had opened his
carefully rehearsed bag of tricks.

There is some peculiar psychology about humor. If people make up their
minds that they are going to laugh and that a performance is bound to be
funny, nothing on earth can keep them from enjoying themselves. The most
serious remark will be greeted with howls of approval; the most ancient
joke takes on a novel and present sprightliness. In the slang of the
stage, Barnes' line of patter took.

Four hundred boys simpered, smirked, grinned, giggled, tittered,
chuckled, and guffawed. A wine of merriment flushed the crowd and
mounted to the old mummer's brain and heart. He skipped and danced and
sang; he went through all the drollery and tomfoolery, all the old comic
business he could recall.

The children nudged each other, dug their fists into each other, and
cheered: "Oh, you Barnes