What he asked was that I should come over to the opera house where the rest of the company awaited us, to assist at a rehearsal in the part left open by the illness of the star. I do not now recall if the manager actually made me an offer in this first encounter, but it was in the air that if I suited the part and the part suited me, I was to regard myself as temporarily engaged in Miss Dean's place. So naturally had the occasion come about, that I cannot remember that I found any particular difficulty in reconciling myself to a possible connection with the professional stage. There had been no church of my denomination at Higgleston, and I had affiliated with one made up of the remnants of two or three other houseless sects, under the caption of the United Congregations, and there was nothing in its somewhat loosened discipline that positively forbade the theatre. In my work with McWhirter, the play had come to mean so much the intimate expression of life, so wove itself with all that had been profound and heroic in the experience of the people, that it seemed to come quite as a matter of course for me to be walking out between the captain and the manager toward the opera house. O'Farrell, too, must have beguiled me with that extraordinary Celtic faculty for the sympathetic note, for I am sure I received the impression as we went, that his play, "The Shamrock," meant quite as much to the Irish temperament, as "The Spy" could mean to Ohianna. The manager and McWhirter had crossed one another's trails on more than one occasion, which seemed to give the whole affair the colour of neighbourliness. It transpired in the course of our walk that Laurine Dean, America's greatest emotional actress--it was O'Farrell called her that--had been taken down at Waterbury with bronchitis, and the cast having been already disarranged by an earlier defection, he had been obliged to cancel several one-night stands and put in at Kincade to wait until a substitute could be procured from St. Louis or Chicago, which difficulty was happily obviated by the discovery of Mrs. Olivia Bettersworth. All this, as I was to learn later, was not so near the truth as it might be, but it served. I could never make out, so insistent was each to claim the credit of it, whether it was O'Farrell or McWhirter first thought of offering the part to me, but there it was for me to take it or leave it as I was so inclined. Our own performance was in Armory Hall and this was my first entrance of the back premises of a proper stage. I recall as we came in through the stage door having no feeling about it all but an odd one of being entirely habituated to such entrances.