RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
casion. We were all overtrained, I suppose. One thing after another went wrong until at the crisis of the play, where the hero is supposed to find in the barrel of a gun the scrap of paper upon which the whole plot hinges, the amateur hero looked pretty foolish when he discovered there wasn't any gun. Another one of the company, in a fit of absentmindedness, no doubt due to overwrought nerves, had carried it off the stage, and just when the situation was getting tragic for the hero the culprit came creeping back with it and carefully put it where it belonged, for all the world as if he thought he were making himself invisible to the audience.
But our ardour was not dampened. I remember Mr. Taft specially in a burlesque of "The Sleeping Beauty," which, in its legitimate form, had been produced for charity at Pike's Opera House. The Unity Club, a most respectable organization of the young men of the Unitarian Church, decided to give their version of the same story, and it was a huge success. Mr. Taft played the title rôle and his brother Horace, who is six feet four in his stocking feet, shared with the Beauty the honours of the evening as a most enchanting Puck.
Then wre had parties in the country, too. Many of our friends had country places that spread along the Madison Road and the Grandin Road on East Walnut Hills, and two of my closest friends lived out there in a great house, looking down over the majestic but tawny Ohio River, above the point where the sweeping curve begins that carries it by the amphitheatre in which the business part of the city is built. It was a long distance to East Walnut Hills and in my girlhood we had to go the greater part of the way in a clumsy old omnibus that clumped along over the unpaved roads at the rate of about three miles an hour. But such little inconveniences didn't trouble us, and many were the vaudeville and charade parties that we had, there being
8
