'Bravo! bravo!' cried Turk, who had entered during the scene. 'If the author isn't satisfied with that performance, then nothing will satisfy him. But nothing less than a hundred nights' run ever does satisfy an author--How are you, mother? How do you do, Chris, my boy? Well, Josey, old girl! No, nothing less than that ever does satisfy an author, who invariably says, when a piece is a failure, that the actors are muffs and don't know their business. But they get as good as they give; let actors alone for reckoning up an author. They know how much of the credit belongs to them, and how much to him.' Josey laughed merrily at this. 'It almost always all belongs to the actor, Turk,' she said. 'Of course it does, and very properly too. The audience say, when an actor makes a point, What a clever fellow the author is! They should read the stuff: they'd form a different opinion. Josey, do you know it is nearly ten o'clock?' A look of some meaning passed between Turk and Josey, and Josey desired the children to put away their work. Presently they all went to bed, my mother going with them at their express desire. Only Turk, Josey, and I were now in the kitchen. We talked on various subjects, not in the most natural way, as it appeared to me; I said little, not being inclined for conversation. Turk was somewhat thoughtful, and more than usually observant of me, but Josey was in the wildest of spirits, and laughed without apparent cause, and said the most absurd things. 'I knew a lady,' she said, 'who played a character-part in a successful piece, which had an immense run; it was played for more than two hundred nights. She hadn't a great deal to say, but every time she spoke she either commenced or ended with "Bless my soul!" Now, if you will believe me, her "Bless my soul!" made the piece. Every time she said it the audience roared with laughter, and you could hear them as they went away from the theatre of a night saying, "Bless my soul!" to one another, and laughing, as if there was really something wonderfully comic in the words. It was a great misfortune to her, for her mind so ran upon it, that morning, noon, and night she was continually saying nothing but "Bless my soul!" until her friends got so wearied of it that they wished she hadn't a soul to bless. I slept with her one night, and all through her sleep she was talking to herself, and blessing her soul. It was the ruin of her as an actress; for always afterwards the people in the theatre called out, "Hallo! here conies Bless-my-soul!" and of course that spoilt the effect of a good many of her characters.' 'But that's not as bad,' said Turk, 'as me when I played The Thug for seven months. Do you remember, Josey?' 'Do I remember it?' Josey repeated, with a look of comic horror. 'Haven't I cause to remember it? You see, Chris, he had to strangle people in the piece. How many every night, Turk?' 'Seventeen,' he replied in a tone of great satisfaction.