Wherever we went our fame had preceded us and what the house offered was ours. I learned then, what I have observed often since, that the most sentimentally responsive of audiences, the one most surely and easily reached by any suggestion of God or home or mother, is the audience that has no God, no home, and hasn't given a thought to mother in a year.
I was in good company with "Hazel Kirke." Among the cast were Mrs. E. L. Davenport, Annie Russell, Ada Gilman, Mrs. Cecile Rush, C. W. Couldock, Charles Wheatly, J. G. Grahame and young Harry Davenport. The son of Mr. and Mrs. E. L. Davenport—he one of of the finest tragedians, and she one of the first actresses of our stage—and a brother of the great Fanny Davenport, my accompanist in "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep" is an actor and a gentleman worthy of his antecedents, but in 1883 he was an insufferably fresh youth of about eighteen. One of his most objectionable habits was that of helping himself to a cigar from any pocket but his own, and lighting it airily without so much as a by-your-leave.
Somewhere in the South I bought a loaded cigar, then a prime American practical joke and a favorite with the village cut-up. Removing
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