I was just about to say, “So you've just awakened to that?” but pity and politeness deterred me. Every one else had known it, all these years. Newgag, to be sure, should naturally have been, as he was, the last to discover it. Newgag thus went one step further than any comedian I have ever known. Having detected his inability to amuse audiences, he confessed it. People who know actors and read this will already have said that it is a fiction, and that Newgag's admission is false to life. Not so; I am writing not about comedians in general, but about Newgag. That he had come to so exceptional a concession marked the depth of his despair. I tried to cheer him. “Nonsense, my boy! They give you bad parts. Go out of comic opera. Try tragedy.” I had spoken innocently and sincerely, but Newgag thought I was jesting. Instead of his usual attempt at lofty callousness, however, he smiled that dismal, marionette-like smile of his. That gave me an idea, of which I said nothing at the time. Several months afterward, a manager, who is a friend of mine, was suddenly plunged in distress because of the serious illness of an actor who was to fill a part in a new American comedy that the manager was to produce on the next night. “What on earth shall I do?” he asked. “Play the part yourself, as Hoyt does in such an emergency--or get Newgag.” “Who's Newgag?” “He's a friend of mine, out of a position. I met him to-day very much frayed.” “Bring him to me.” Newgag was overwhelmed when I told him of the opportunity. “I never acted in straight comedy,” he said. “I can't do it. I might as well try to play Juliet.” “He wants you only to speak the lines, that's all. You're a quick study, you know. Come on!” I had almost to drag the man to the manager. He allowed himself, in a semistupefied condition, to be engaged. He took the part, sat up all night in his boarding-house and learned it, went to rehearsal almost letter-perfect in the morning, and nervously prepared to face the ordeal of the evening. At six o'clock, he wished to go to the manager and give up the part. “I can never do it,” he wailed to me. “I haven't had time to form a conception of it and to get up byplay. You see, it's an eccentric character part,--a man from the country whom everybody takes for a fool, but who shows up strong at the last. I can't--” “Oh, don't act it. You're only engaged in the emergency, you know. Simply go on and say your lines and come off.” “That's all I can do,” he said, with a dubious shake of the head. “If only I'd had time to study it!”