Who clamoreth with a loud voice and saith, verily, am not I a bad man? Who is he that walketh unsteadily and singeth unto himself, "The bright angels are waiting for me?" Who wotteth not even a fractional wot, but setteth his chronometer with the wooden watch of the watchmaker, and by means of a tooth-brush? Go to. Is it not he who bangeth his intellect ferninst the bock beer, even unto the eleventh hour? BILLIOUS NYE AND THE AMATEUR STAGE. |A great portion of my time at present is taken up in preparations for my appearance in a few weeks on the amateur stage. Excursion trains will run from Denver on this occasion, and no pains will be spared to make the grand spectacular hoo-doo one long to be remembered. Whenever any society or association desires to make a few thousand dollars for the relief of knock-kneed Piutes, or to purchase liver-pads for impecunious Senegambians, it only has to advertise that I am to appear on the amateur stage in a heavy part. I am not a brilliant success in the "Say-wilt-be-mine" part. Just as I get the heroine up close to me near the footlights, and begin to hug her a little as I would at home, and I temporarily forget that a thousand eyes are upon me, it comes over me that my wife is in the audience and does not seem to enjoy the play. This throws a large four-dollar gloom over the entire surroundings, and I seem to lose my grip, so to speak. Many years ago when I was young and, as one might say, in the hey-day of vigorous manhood, and had an appetite like a P. K. Dederick Perpetual Hay Press, I consented to take a leading part, and although I could generally worry through a little light comedy, I had not then learned how rough and uncouth I appeared as the heavy lover. I therefore consented to hug a beautiful young thing before five hundred people, and in the full glare of the footlights, whom I would not have dared to wink at in her father's parlor at midnight, with the lamp turned clear down. I have an easy, gliding stage gait that is something between a "pace" and a "rack." It is full of the very poetry of motion. I "racked" up to the heroine at the proper time and told her how I loved her and how it was tearing me all to pieces, and so forth. Just as I was coming to the grand flourish, however, I forgot a word, and while I was thinking that up, the remainder of the speech slowly drifted away to where I couldn't get at it. To add to the general hilarity of the occasion the stage manager, who was furnishing at that moment some pale blue lightning and distant thunder, and who happened to be drunk, threw in a heavy snow storm that should have gone into another piece. I stood there waiting and trying to think of my part about thirty years, I should think. Any way, the snow got knee deep and the heroine excused herself and went away to warm her feet. She told me to call her up by telephone when I could think of my piece.