However, the Harlequinade itself thoroughly amused her, although she did not approve of the Harlequin’s dance with her mother the Columbine.
“Who is that spotted man?” she asked. “Why does he frow muvver up like that? I don’t like him. I don’t like his black face. I won’t let him frow up my lamb what Santy Claus gave me.”
“Well, you threw it up yourself just now and hit the poor fiddle.”
“Yes,” Letizia acknowledged in a tone of plump contentment.
The Harlequinade came to an end with a wonderful trap-act, in which the Clown was pursued by the Policeman head first through one shop window, head first out through another, up a long flight of stairs that turned into planks just as they both reached the top, so that they both rolled down to the bottom and disappeared into a cellar. Out again and diving through more windows, whirling round doors without hinges, climbing over roofs, sliding down chimneys, until at last the Policeman’s pursuit was shaken off and the Clown, after bounding up ten feet into the air through a star-trap, alighted safely on the stage whence, after snatching a basket that was hanging up outside a shop window, he began to pelt the audience with crackers while the orchestra stood up to play God Save the Queen and the curtain slowly descended on a great success at the Theatre Royal, Greenwich.
CHAPTER XI
THE END OF THE HARLEQUINADE
“I don’t think you were a very good little girl,” said Nancy reproachfully to her daughter when she was brought round to the dressing-room by Mrs. Pottage after the matinée.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” averred Letizia entirely impenitent. “My lamb what Santy Claus gave me saided I was a very good little girl. He saided ‘Oh, Tizia, you is a good little girl!’”
The landlady beamed.