The audience was seated, as usual, on planks laid from box to box and nailed. They did not have to sit there long. After a great deal of giggling and rustling behind the big green curtain that had been made of sacks, pieced together and dyed, Winona came out to announce the beginning of the entertainment.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she commenced, “to-night we are going to have, beside several musical selections, some moving pictures with explanatory recitations—some very moving pictures. After the opening song we will have the first one, ‘Gentle Alice Brown.’”
The audience applauded, and then the girls sang a Camp Fire song in chorus. After that Louise and Edith played a conscientious mandolin-banjo duet. Then Marie, who was the reader of the evening, came out with a copy of Gilbert’s Bab Ballads and very slowly began to read “Gentle Alice Brown.”
At the first line the curtain was pulled back, revealing Winona alone against a sheet background. She was in an 1860 costume made from an old, full petticoat and tight underwaist, dyed pink, and helped out with small puffed sleeves and a sash. Her curls were bound with a wreath of artificial roses from the ten-cent store, slightly over one ear. She sat on a chair with her head on her hand, and she was looking mournfully over the chair-back. Marie began,
It was a robber’s daughter, and her name was Alice Brown,
Her father was the terror of a small Italian town;
Her mother was a foolish, weak, but amiable old thing,
But it isn’t of her parents that I’m going for to sing.
As Marie went on, across the stage galloped ferociously Helen, who had been given the role of Robber Brown because she was one of the tallest of the girls. A red flannel shirt of Tom Merriam’s, topped by a fishing hat and black mustachio, were most convincing. Her short kilt, which gave her rather the look of a Greek than an Italian bandit, was met by a pair of fishing-boots, and she wore three carving-knives and a cartridge belt. She strode ferociously across the stage, looking neither to right nor left.
Edith Hillis, trotting meekly behind her as Mrs. Brown, wore a baggy old long skirt, a bandanna tied around her waist, one around her neck and another on her head. She only had one carving-knife. But the lovely Alice did not deign to look at her parents. She gazed sadly out over the audience, while Marie went on to tell how—
As Alice was sitting at her window-sill one day
A beautiful young gentleman he chanced to pass that way,
A sorter at the Custom-house, it was his daily road—
(The Custom-house was fifteen minutes walk from her abode).
At this point the hero crossed the stage dashingly, with a cane under his arm. It was Adelaide, in a plaid cap, a waxed mustache, and a very precise duster which reached her heels. A pipe (she said afterwards it had a dreadful taste) stuck from one corner of her mouth.
Gentle Alice sighed deeply, and so did her lover, who became aware of her presence with a tragic start. He halted, waved to her, sighed with his hand on his heart, and looked altogether very lovelorn. Gentle Alice did not notice him at first, but she gradually seemed to yield, and finally languished softly at him—and winked. So did he. Then he kissed his hands at her and went off reluctantly to work, while Alice wiped away her tears with a large bandanna such as her parents had worn. (They were the historic bandannas which had served Winona and Louise so well on their peddling trip.)