The next time we were to play that piece I would fain have had it changed and have gone back to my old fooling; but I was not master of the troupe, and the townspeople, it seemed, clamoured for me, Piccinino, to play the part a second time with that new talent which time or chance, as they thought, had developed in me. So we played it.
Genius can do as it likes with its world, but we poor folk, who had only a little trifle of talent, for which we could not always even find any market at all,—we could only obey our little shred of the public obediently, and give it what it asked.
That night, when I went on the stage, I felt that she was there before I saw her—there amidst the populace, with that bright golden head of hers rising out from the sea of the swarthy peasant faces, and the sweet, saucy child's eyes laughing upon me across the yellow smoky flicker of the dull oil lamps.
I saw her: I stammered, I stumbled, I felt blind and dizzy. My comrades playing with me hissed sharply in my ear, "What ails thee, Piccinino? Art mad, or drunk, or ill, or what?" They did not rouse me. I stood staring dully across the little play-house.
The people grew angry at the pause and at the silence. Their favour was my daily bread; their
