"I put that scar over your right eye twenty-five years ago, when you were stealing peaches out of father's orchard. Yes, I'm the same Williams."
Which must have shattered some of the nerve of that same legal gentleman.
But that's nothing to the nerve of a Western landlord! One of them roped me in for fair. You see the blamed hotel burned down while I was there, and—would you believe it?—the next day I got a bill from the proprietor for a fire in my room.
I've been abroad more than once during my checkered career, the last time with a company that played the "Children of the Ghetto." When it was staged in New York, in order to get the best effect of the mob scene the manager went into the New York Ghetto and engaged the real article, employing at the same time an interpreter to explain to them in Yiddish the stage directions. The plan was successful.
But when the production was taken to London we abandoned this scheme.
The English manager had employed the usual group of cockney supers, and spent a good deal of English gold in buying make-ups for them. When our manager saw the lot he was furious.
"Why," he screamed, "that band of mutts looks like a gang of sneak thieves trying to dodge the police! They'll ruin the play!—ruin it!—do you hear me? They'll ruin it! Look at those whiskers!"
And he yanked off the beard of one of the supers, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.
"And look at that wig!" and a bit of false head-dressing followed the whiskers to the floor, and was shredded under the American's angry heel. "And that one, too!" Another wig went to destruction. "And that nose!—that nose!"