' It was sometimes
a hard struggle for us, in bad seasons, to keep body and soul
together. Learning to sing and dance in public often meant
learning to bear hunger and cold in private, when I was
apprenticed to the stage. And yet I have lived to look back on my
days with the strolling players as the happiest days of my life!
"I was ten years old when the first serious misfortune that I can
remember fell upon me. My mother died, worn out in the prime of
her life. And not long afterward the strolling company, brought
to the end of its resources by a succession of bad seasons, was
broken up.
"I was left on the world, a nameless, penniless outcast, with one
fatal inheritance--God knows, I can speak of it without vanity,
after what I have gone through!--the inheritance of my mother's
beauty.
"My only friends were the poor starved-out players. Two of them
(husband and wife) obtained engagements in another company, and I
was included in the bargain The new manager by whom I was
employed was a drunkard and a brute. One night I made a trifling
mistake in the course of the performances--and I was savagely
beaten for it. Perhaps I had inherited some of my father's
spirit--without, I hope, also inheriting my father's pitiless
nature.
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