I shall never forget the experience. The horrors of it were such that the Day of Judgment itself have possessed small terrors for me since. We were tried out at Albany, New York, before an audience of sixty people, in an auditorium capable of seating three thousand. Everything seemed to go wrong, and on our way up to Albany Munkittrick managed to catch a cold which left him terribly hoarse upon our arrival at the old Delavan House in New York's capital city. To overcome this hoarseness Munkittrick bought a box of troches of a well known brand, but instead of taking one or two of them he devoured the whole box in about twenty minutes, as if they had been gumdrops or marshmallows, with the result that his tongue began to swell up, and by eight o'clock when we were due on the platform that essential factor of clarity of enunciation was "too big for the job," if I may so put it, occupying not less than seven-eighths of the available space inside of Munkittrick's mouth, all of which, combined with the natural nervousness of a debut, put us quite out of commission.
As a matter of fact we should never have gone out upon the platform; but we did, and while the chairman was announcing to the scattered multitude in front that we were the greatest combination of wit, eloquence, and humor the world had ever known, not even excepting Nye and Riley, who had so often delighted Albany audiences in the past, Munkittrick and I sat there quivering with fear, not even daring to look at each other. I do not believe that even the Babes in the Wood themselves looked upon their prospects with greater dread. It was an awful evening; so awful that before it was over a frivolous reaction set in which I truly think was the only thing that enabled us to push it through to the bitter end.
Of course it was a failure. We knew that almost before we began; but it was borne in upon us at the end by the fact that the chairman, who had invited us to join him in a little supper afterward to meet a few of his friends, vanished as if the earth had opened up and swallowed him, and not a crumb of his supper or the hem of his garment did either of us ever see again. Fortunately we had been paid in cash before we went out upon the stage. If it had not been so, or had we been paid by a check on which payment could have been stopped, I doubt if either of us would have realized a penny on the transaction. Moreover, I did not venture to call upon the major for at least a week, and even then my meeting with him was merely casual. I bumped against him on the street in front of his office in the Everett House.
"Hello, Bangs!" said he. "Have a good time at Albany?"
"Fine!" said I. "The town is full of charming people."
"Well—I'm glad somebody enjoyed it," said the major.
"Any more bookings?" said I.
"No," said the major, with a far-away look in his eye. "Fact is, old man, times are sort o' hard, and after thinking the matter over I've decided that I guess we'd better put off our drive for new business until—well, until some other season."
And that was all the chiding I received from that kindly soul!
Several years elapsed before I resumed professional relations with Major Pond, and the incident that brought about that resumption has always seemed to me to be most amusing, and to bring out in vivid colors the quality of the major's temper. Indeed it was about as illuminating a little farce-comedy as one would care to see.