“Is it an ox? Him-yah, him-yah.” And they jabbed their spears into me. Some of the supers jabbed me pretty hard, among them Babe Durgon, who delighted in tormenting me.
“Is it a sheep? Him-yah, him-yah.” Again they jabbed me, and I was so mad I was cussing them under my breath.
“Is it a pig? Him-yah, him-yah.”
The audience was breathless with tense excitement.
“Is it a goat?”
The entire gallery broke into a whirlwind roar: “Yes! yes! He's a goat.”
Laughter rocked the audience. They all knew I was Welsh and saw the joke. The horror and suspense had been so great that when it broke with comic relief the house was really hysterical. It stopped the show.
I played supernumerary parts in many shows that winter including Richard III and other Shakespearean plays. At the battle of Bosworth field where Richard cries: “A horse, a horse; my kingdom for a horse,” the supers in the army were clattering their swords on the opposing shields in a great hubbub and shouting, “Hay, hay hay!” I was of a thrifty turn of mind, and said: “Hold on, boys. Don't order too much hay until we see whether he gets the horse or not.”
A hypnotist came to the opera-house and I volunteered to be hypnotized. He couldn't hypnotize me. I felt rather bad about it. I was out of the show. Later I learned that all of the “Perfessor's” best subjects came with him under salary, and the local boys who made good were faking like the professionals. The whole thing was a cheat and I had not caught on. I was too serious-minded to think of faking. But several of the boys took to it naturally, and among them was Babe Durgon, the bully. He could be hypnotized and I couldn't. But several years later I had the satisfaction of “hypnotizing” him myself, as I told about in my first chapter.
Although I always regarded myself as a humorist, the impression I made on my comrades was that of a serious and religious fellow. I quoted the Bible to them so often that they nicknamed me “the Welsh Parson.” I was the general errand boy of the town. Everybody knew me. And when there was a job of passing hand-bills for the operahouse, or ringing bells for auction sales, I always got the job. Every nickel that rolled loose in the town landed in my pocket and I took it home to mother. Mother was my idol and what she said was law. One night I heard the band playing and started down-town. Mother told me to be sure to be in bed by nine o'clock. I found that a minstrel show had been thrown out of its regular route by a flood and was playing our town unexpectedly. The stage hands knew me and passed me in. I was seeing a high-priced show for nothing. But when it came nine o'clock, I went home. I told my mother that I had walked out of the most gorgeous minstrel show. She asked me why and I told her because she wanted me to be in bed by nine o'clock.