his d. h. coupon for an orchestra seat.

A, B, C, and D glowed successively on the announcement spaces and passed
into oblivion, each plunging Mr. Hart deeper into gloom. Others of the
audience shrieked, squirmed, whistled, and applauded; but Bob Hart, "All
the Mustard and a Whole Show in Himself," sat with his face as long and
his hands as far apart as a boy holding a hank of yarn for his
grandmother to wind into a ball.

But when H came on, "The Mustard" suddenly sat up straight. H was the
happy alphabetical prognosticator of Winona Cherry, in Character Songs
and Impersonations. There were scarcely more than two bites to Cherry;
but she delivered the merchandise tied with a pink cord and charged to
the old man's account. She first showed you a deliciously dewy and
ginghamy country girl with a basket of property daisies who informed you
ingenuously that there were other things to be learned at the old log
school-house besides cipherin' and nouns, especially "When the Teach-er
Kept Me in." Vanishing, with a quick flirt of gingham apron-strings,
she reappeared in considerably less than a "trice" as a fluffy
"Parisienne"--so near does Art bring the old red mill to the Moulin
Rouge. And then--

But you know the rest. And so did Bob Hart; but he saw somebody else. He
thought he saw that Cherry was the only professional on the short order
stage that he had seen who seemed exactly to fit the part of "Helen
Grimes" in the sketch he had written and kept tucked away in the tray
of his trunk. Of course Bob Hart, as well as every other normal actor,
grocer, newspaper man, professor, curb broker, and farmer, has a play
tucked away somewhere. They tuck 'em in trays of trunks, trunks of
trees, desks, haymows, pigeonholes, inside pockets, safe-deposit vaults,