But I tell you, my dear, I am glad that Anna Bess put me on the scenery committee the first time 1906 had a play. Ever since I left Bryn Mawr I have been looking for the things I learned that were "going to prove useful in after years." For the first time I've hit something. When the boys wanted to get up a play I showed them how to put squares of canvas together, tacked on poles at the platform end of the big schoolroom. I marked out a court scene with charcoal, and painted it in. One advantage of making scenery here is that paint dries quicker than it did in the cellar of our dormitory. I economized time by sewing costumes while the boys rehearsed. It was the most unimaginable sort of rehearsing. For the play was to be given in Turkish, of which Jeanne and I understood not a word. All the same with my little red leather-bound English Shakespeare stuck in the corner of the divan near my lapful of sewing, I was supposed to criticize the acting. I kept looking from needle to book to actor. Jeanne, on the other side of the divan, was following in a French translation. Hamlet and Ophelia dashed around while I put ermine on the king's coat. The boys would not listen to cutting. They were game for the whole play--not quailing before scenes that Irving and Terry could not swing. They have prodigious memories. We found that out when one of them memorized Herbert's entire lecture on the Rise of the Papacy, and gave it afterwards as answer to a question in term examination. Their patience and endurance are limitless. They never get bored. Jeanne and I were back of the scenes on the great night to start the play with everybody dressed and bewigged, painted and securely hitched together. Clothes had to be sewed on the ladies. The boys entered so fully into the spirit of the thing that when the show was actually on, they hadn't time to think about their clothes. My red Cretan rug, firmly strapped to the shoulders of Hamlet's mother, made a real court train. (The actors had practised not to walk on it. Luckily they learned this early in the rehearsals, when Ophelia, passing his future mother-in-law, stepped on the Cretan rug and "sat down too much" on the hard schoolroom floor.) Crowns and wigs had to be anchored with adhesive tape. Ophelia, young and rather slender for his age, was capable of the martyrdom of forcing his feet into my satin dancing slippers. It was possible only when I made him wear my silk stockings. His own knitted socks were much too thick for stage purposes as well as for slippers. A schoolroom bench, assisted by the boxes of two croquet games and covered by rugs, made a passable throne. The stage manager was dismayed when he realized that Doctor Christie's pulpit was screwed fast to the platform. I discovered that the top of the pulpit could be removed, and comforted the boys by pointing out to them that those in the audience who had ever seen a real theater would certainly think the pulpit was a prompter's box.