The lights were turned on. A drop-scene fell; the stage was transformed, for, in the middle distance, swelling green hills rose against a soft blue sky seen between trees in the foreground. Sunshine lay on the landscape, enhancing the haze in the distance and throwing up the hills more prominently against it. The cries and uproar continued. Meanwhile, in the common dressing-room beyond the wings, there was being enacted a scene which if slightly less tumultuous in expression was considerably more dangerous in quality. A quick word went the round of the stars' private rooms; it penetrated to the sanctum of the Japanese wrestlers; it came to the ear of the manager himself: "The Little Patti's struck!" It sounded ominous, and, thereupon, the Vaudeville flocked to the dressing-room door to see--what? Merely a child in a tantrum, a heap of rags on the floor, a little girl in white petticoats stamping, dancing, pulling away from an old Italian woman who was trying to robe her and exhorting, imploring, threatening the child in almost one and the same breath. The manager rushed to the rescue for the house was losing its head. He seized the child by the arm. "What's the matter here, Aileen?" "I ain't goin' ter dance a coon ter-night--not ter-night!" she cried defiantly and in intense excitement; "he's in the box again, an' I'm goin' to give him the Sunday-night song, like as I did before when he give me the flowers, so now!" Nonna Lisa, the old Italian, slipped the white dress deftly over the mutinous head, so muffling the half-shriek. The manager laughed. "Hurry up then--on with you!" The child sprang away with a bound. "I've seen this too many times before," he added; "it's an attack of 'the last night's nerves.'--Hark!" The tumult was drowning the last notes of the orchestral intermezzo, as the little girl, clad now wholly in white, ran in upon the stage and coming again down the centre raised her hand as if to command silence. With the gallery to see was to obey; the floor and balconies having subsided the applause from above died away. The child, standing in the full glare of the footlights with the sunny skyey spaces and overlapping blue hills behind her, half-faced the brilliant house as, without accompaniment, she began to sing: "There is a green hill far away Without a city wall."