"N-n-no, Ma'am," replied the terrified clerk, "I d-d-did not, Ma'am."
Charlotte Cushman's manner was the opposite of that of Ellen Tree. She was a perfect child of Nature, and one meeting her would have supposed that she was a gentle, quiet home-keeper with no thought except to please her own.
Speaking of Joe Jefferson she said:
"I think his paintings are as marvelous as his acting, and the colors in his voice blend as perfectly as those in his paintings. He really must have had a dog named Schneider when he was playing Rip Van Winkle, and if you had told him differently he would not have believed you. He could fool himself into thinking that whatever he acted was a fact, and his audience readily took the same view."
Once when Charlotte Cushman was with us Judge Moncure, then an old man, came in and, meeting his wife, greeted her with great chivalry, bending and kissing her hand. Judge Joynes, of Petersburg, asked, "How old is Mrs. Moncure, Judge?" Judge Moncure replied, "She was sixteen when I married her, Judge, and to me she has been that age ever since."
The little incident reminded Charlotte of the Brownings, whom she had known in Florence, and of the beautiful compliments that Robert Browning used to pay his wife. She spoke of his indignation when Mrs. Browning's poetry was compared with his own in a manner unfavorable to her. He really felt that she was superior to himself and had no patience with people who could not appreciate her greater merit.
Miss Cushman told me that of all the parts she had ever played she most enjoyed Romeo, which she used to play to her sister's Juliet.
She was fond of dialects, saying, "Everything is more fascinating than plain English." In Ireland she talked the brogue with the peasants so well that she might have passed for one of them. She was equally at home with Scotch, German and Italian dialects, and when in the North had been noted for recitations in negro speech, which she thought the most beautiful of all. But on coming to Richmond she found that she did not know anything about the lingo of the darkies. Being anxious to learn it, she used to talk with old Wash and Julia, two historical characters at the Ballard and Exchange Hotel, repeating their expressions over and over. Later she would try to say them, finding that she was no more expert than in the beginning. Thus she learned that to know plantation talk one must be born to it; it cannot be acquired.
She was at that time victim to a painful and wasting disease. Seeing her suffering one day from the treatment for the malady, I said: