Phyllis

by Maria Thompson Daviess

Sam Hayes was "Old Hickory," General Andrew Jackson, the night before the battle of New Orleans. Mr. Douglass Byrd wrote his piece and Judge Luttrell, who is the son of one of that famous Tennessee hero's best friends and staff-officers, was so affected he blew his nose feelingly.

Pink would be a negro, so as for once to be rid—by the aid of burnt cork—of the disgrace of his unmasculine beauty, and he was so like Uncle Pompey that Lovelace Peyton insisted on calling out to him from the second seat until Pink had to tell him who he was before he could go on with his hen story, which was one of Uncle Pompey's own, and which was rib-aching funny.

Tony and Roxanne did the most interesting real Scout adventure, without words, and the audience sat spellbound while she fainted from heat prostration, and he put around her head a wet bandage made with his and her handkerchief, raised a signal for other Scouts to come and help, and finally took her up on his back and carried her off the platform behind the curtain. The applause was deafening, though Lovelace Peyton didn't like the scene one bit, and he kept feeling Roxanne's head after she came and sat down in front of us in the audience.

Nobody knew that I was going to be or do a thing, for I had begged them not to make me, because of the difficulty I have in managing my feet and elbows on account of their rapid growth right now. But I did! I think I have caught the family pride habit and that is what made me do it. This is how I felt. I looked down at the seats of honor reserved for the Byrdsville distinguished citizens, and saw my father sitting in one of the high places, as it were, between Judge Luttrell and Mr. Chadwell, and his face was just beaming with enjoyment of the way all those other men's sons and daughters were distinguishing themselves with their beauty and talent. And then out in the audience Judge Luttrell had Tony's mother, dressed in lovely black silk and also full of pride, while Mr. Chadwell kept nodding to Pink's mother at everything that Pink did, like there never had been a negro minstrel before. I thought of Father being the only lonely one up on the platform and with only me to be a credit to him—and me not doing it. I prayed for an immediate plan and as I prayed, as is my custom, I acted. I asked Mr. Douglass Byrd quick, if there was time for me to do an impersonation, and he answered with the most wonderfully encouraging smile:

"Go ahead, Miss Phyllis, and you can heat them all."

Now, the only person in the world I could ever be like is my own self, or Father himself, and as I sat and looked at him the idea came. Last year the governess took me to hear Father make a speech when he presented a library building to the college from which he graduated. It was such a fine one and full of so much humor and pathos, as all speeches should be to hold the attention of an audience, that it was published in all the papers in New York, and I learned it by heart from pride over it. That was what I impersonated—my own father with him looking on!

All the others had had costumes and burnt cork and things to help them; but I had on a pink flowered organdie and pink slippers with a huge pink bow on my head, and my looks were all dead against my success. But I did succeed! I knew I would when I took my stand and looked down into Father's surprised and alarmed face. I shrugged my shoulders in my dress just as he did in his dress coat, dropped my head on one side, and pursed my mouth up on the left corner and let my right eye droop as his does. Then I began—and for that five minutes I was Father. The speech just rolled off my eloquent tongue and the people laughed in the right places, just as the people at the college did, and the Colonel blew his nose like a trumpet when I said the short sentences about the memorial table to be put in the hallway to the "fellows who have gone," while the end-up, with its funny little dedication to the immortals bound in leather that would live on the library shelf and the ones hound in serge and corduroy that would sit at the tables in reading-room, brought the storm of applause that sounded like a tornado.

When I stopped being Father and came to my own self I was sitting beside the Idol in the audience and watching Judge Luttrell slap Father on the back and Mr. Chadwell laughing so that he and the Colonel looked like jolly, bald-headed boys. Mr. Chadwell is as disgracefully handsome as Pink, and doesn't look much older. And I never saw my father's face look like it did to-night, and I had never hoped to see him in a position that fitted him like the one on the platform with Byrdsville's distinguished citizens. I ought to be a happy girl, and I am.

Only Tony Luttrell troubles me, he is so quiet for him; and when he walked home with me, he was as gentle and affectionate to me as if I had been sick. Could something be the matter with me and I not know it? I felt like I did when the secret was first stolen two weeks ago, though Roxanne and the Idol seem to have forgotten all about it and nobody else knows.

There is such a lovely moon out over the garden that I can't put out the light and go to bed, though I saw Roxanne put hers out a half-hour ago. I wonder why I ever started a record of myself and my friends like I am doing? But I'm glad I did; for as I turn each leaf of you, leather Louise, things seem to get brighter and happier for me, and as I look at all these clean sheets in the future I wonder what I can find to make them as lovely as the happenings on the others have been. I'm thankful for the air that makes Mother sleep, and for the moral surroundings for Father, and for the loving-kindness of my fellow-men—girls and boys—to me. Yes, I realize that being beloved is a novelty to me, but I know better than to think it will ever wear off—the pleasures of it, I mean. Good-night!