The Empty Stocking distribution was quite another matter—a real event. It was held at Ford’s Theatre, where Nat Goodwin and Maxine Elliot were playing that week, on an afternoon when there was no matinée. The big tree was set up in the center of the stage, and the stars were invited to take part. Maxine Elliot offered to fill stockings; Nat Goodwin agreed to be Santa Claus. When a particularly angelic child was needed, to perch on Nat Goodwin’s shoulder and distribute the stockings, Lillian Gish was chosen, and so made her first stage appearance—rode into the drama—on the shoulder of one of the best-known actors of the day. * * * * * Dorothy and Lillian were near enough together to be playmates. Lillian was not so good at play as Dorothy. Long afterwards she wrote: “I envy this dear, darling Dorothy with all my heart, for she is the side of me that God left out.... “All my life I have wanted to play happily, as she does, only to find myself bad at playing. As a little girl, I was not much good at playing, and I find that, try as I will, I don’t play very convincingly today.” They were good little girls—Lillian especially so. They had been taught to say their prayers, and would as soon have omitted their little nightgowns as their prayers. If Dorothy made a scramble of hers, while Lillian offered her petition to the last word and syllable, and overborne by some ancient melancholy prayed regularly that she might wake up in Heaven, it was only as Nature had intended them to be from the beginning. Different as they were, then and always, they had one great interest in common: their mother. They thought her the best and most beautiful person in the world. Dorothy loved to think that she looked like her, and cried when told that Lillian “looked more like Mama” than she did. From the beginning, almost, Lillian was inclined to be orderly, tidy. Dorothy—well, Dorothy was different. Even in that early day, when Lillian was no more than five, she carefully removed her clothes and laid them neatly together. Dorothy did not remove hers. She dropped, or flung, them off, and where they fell they remained. It was said—this was much later—that you could at any time find Dorothy by following her clothes.