Mechanically he had made his old comic entrance, tripping his right toe over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy. The boys, determined to be pleased, giggled appreciatively. "How--how are you, boys?" Barnes asked, seriously. The audience snickered with delight. He was such a funny-looking old man! "I hope you'll like my work," he went on, desperately, "or else we might as well go home. I guess I'm the whole show, for a little while, at least, as the feller said when he fell out o' the balloon." The house roared with approval. "Go wan, Barnesy," shouted a young pair of lungs in the front row. He straightened up, turned his back for a moment, stuck a queer set of mustaches on his upper lip, faced the crowd again, and began: "I was walkin' down the street the other day when my friend J. Pierpoint Morgan stepped up to me an' says, 'Barney, my boy'".... The show had begun. Harry Barnes, singing and talking, had opened his carefully rehearsed bag of tricks. There is some peculiar psychology about humor. If people make up their minds that they are going to laugh and that a performance is bound to be funny, nothing on earth can keep them from enjoying themselves. The most serious remark will be greeted with howls of approval; the most ancient joke takes on a novel and present sprightliness. In the slang of the stage, Barnes' line of patter took. Four hundred boys simpered, smirked, grinned, giggled, tittered, chuckled, and guffawed. A wine of merriment flushed the crowd and mounted to the old mummer's brain and heart. He skipped and danced and sang; he went through all the drollery and tomfoolery, all the old comic business he could recall. The children nudged each other, dug their fists into each other, and cheered: "Oh, you Barnesy!" "Kill it, Kid!" "Whatcha know about dat!" "Sand it down, Barnesy!" The old-timer was doing the famous lock-step jig he had done with Pat Rooney in "Patrice" fifteen or twenty years before. It was so old that it was new. Encore followed encore. The perspiration cascaded through his pores; he grinned and winked and frisked and capered. They would not let him stop. At the end of twenty-five minutes he bowed himself off the stage, and still they called him back. When he gave them, for the "call," the Little Johnny Dugan pantomime from "The Rainmakers," the East Side children, born since the day of such things, were suffocated with delight. What did Dugan do to him? --They say he was untrue to him. Did Dugan owe him money? --No; he stole McCarthy's wife! Who? Little Johnny Dugan? sang Barnes with a quizzical flirt of his head; and lungs that were wont to fill the city streets with news could not even gasp for laughter. The secretary of the organization followed with a speech about future entertainments; another official read a letter from a prominent financier promising the boys a swimming-pool and a half dozen summer excursions.