Mrs. Howard Paul impressed so strongly upon me the importance and the justness of playing one's best to a poor house, that I not only have never forgotten her injunction, but have endeavoured to abide by it. To act without recognition, by applause, laughter, or tears, from an audience is galling to an actor; but, fortunately, I have had a good training in this respect in the private-house engagements, and have got used to it. In town, my audiences have sometimes displayed a want of enthusiasm, which has been easily understood by everybody but myself; and in my earlier days in the country I used to console myself with the fact that if my entertainments did not _go_, the audience did, which was a comfort and a relief. I wonder if my friend Frank Thornton will be offended if I repeat an oft-told story about him? I had the pleasure of knowing him in my early entertaining days, and he himself was remarkably clever in short sketches in character. When I was first engaged at the Opera Comique to appear in _The Sorcerer_, F. Thornton was "specially retained" to understudy me. I believe he was very nearly engaged himself to play the part. Fortunately for me, he was not. During the first week he used to come to me each night, and ask how I was. On my replying that I was "all right--never better," it appeared to me that he departed with a disappointed look. His kind enquiries were repeated, as I thought with extra anxiety; but still I kept well, and showed no signs of fatigue. Then he began to insist that I was not looking well; and I replied that, looks or no looks, I felt perfectly well. Finally he came to me with a pill, which he was certain would do for me. I was also certain that it would "_do_ for me," and declined to take it; I played nearly two hundred consecutive nights of _The Sorcerer_, and nearly _seven hundred_ of _H.M.S. Pinafore_, without missing a single performance. About the third week of the subsequent piece, _The Pirates of Penzance_, I was called away from the theatre through a domestic affliction; and Frank Thornton, at literally a moment's notice, had to don the Major-General's uniform and play my part. It goes without saying that his was an excellent performance, as those who saw his excessively funny impersonation of the cramped old aesthete in _Patience_ will easily understand. The domestic affliction referred to was the sudden death of my father on April 24th, 1880. At the beginning of this book I stated that I should not deal with the shadows of my life. Nor shall I, beyond stating that the shock to me was so terrible that I often wonder now whether I have quite recovered it. My poor darling mother never did, and she followed him in a year and ten months after.