A PANTOMIME.
The stage was out of doors. Two posts were driven into the ground, and between them hung the red table-cloth suspended from a fish-line. This was the drop-curtain.
The audience, in chairs, or on the ground, were directly in front of the stage. At a whistle from the invisible depths the drop-curtain was raised by Blanche Jones, revealing the manager, Preston Gray, who made a low bow, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is with profound pleasure that I present to you the two stars of tragedy, Madame Graylocks, of the Tuscarora Opera Company, and Don Albertus of the Cannibal Islands.”
The two “stars” then step forward, to be greeted by the audience with deafening cheers. Miss Graylocks (alias Mary Gray), her face and hands well stained with walnut-juice, is clad in blue jacket, gray skirt and red-topped boots (Sadie Patten called them “galligaskins”), with a stove-pipe hat on her head. An ounce of black worsted floats down her shoulders for hair. She makes a deep courtesy, Don Albertus (Bert Abbott) a low bow.
He is an Indian chief, clad in a red and green dressing-gown, with a feather duster on his head for a war-plume. His face, like Madame Graylocks’, is a fine mahogany color.
Their “unrivalled performance,” announces the manager, “is to be a charade in two syllables.”