We had rehearsed pretty well, and when the big curtain rolled up, and Ted and I bounded out on the stage dressed in a kind of jockey costume--white silk tights with red silk stockings, blue satin shirts with jockey caps of blue and red, and jockeys' whips in our hands--we both felt pretty cool. Then we began our clog dance. It was the finest kind of clog dancing, I will say, although I did part of it myself, and then we introduced a new feature, singing while the clogs rattled on the floor, and every muscle moving alike. Of course it took--the singing as much as the dancing--and the people hurrahed and clapped and shouted, and wouldn't leave off until we had gone over it three times, and the end man had come on the stage and asked permission for the other performers to go home and go to bed, as the audience seemed fully satisfied with the Valbella Brothers. Then they laughed, and we got back to our dressing-room, when old Sam Stacker stood ready to hug us both. But it was at the last scene that our really great performance came off. I had a pretty hard time making Sam Stacker agree to the expense for this act, but as we were playing a two weeks' engagement, I finally bullied him into it. It required cutting away some of the flies temporarily, and putting in a twenty-foot-square skylight over the stage. This skylight opened in two sections, and after our second appearance, more clog dancing and more scientific ground-tumbling, a big red balloon descended slowly from the roof. At the bottom of this was a double trapeze, and as soon as the balloon came within reach the Valbella Brothers sprang up--we had to get rid of some weights pretty cleverly to make the balloon rise, because we couldn't manage the sand-bags commonly used--grabbed at the trapeze, and performed the double-trapeze act while the great illuminated balloon rose slowly in the air up--up, up, through the roof. Of course on the outside two or three fellows stood on the roof, and we threw them a rope with which they held on to the balloon while we jumped off; and then the gas was let out, and the balloon folded up and laid away for the next day, because after the first night we had to give two performances--one in the afternoon and one in the evening--to satisfy the people, and then the "standing-room only" sign was out before the doors were opened.