became a pair of burly little monsters, who laughed loud, affected laughter at the word “love,” and swore with many long-syllabled German oaths that they would kick with their copper-toes any one who tried to kiss them.  Ah! when you find a fiercely violent temper allied to a stone-cold heart, offer you up an earnest prayer to Him for the safety of the souls coming under the dominion and the power of that woman.

I recall one action of Semantha’s that goes far, I think, to prove what a brave and loyal heart the untaught German girl possessed.  She was very sensitive to ridicule, and when people made fun of her, though she would laugh good-humouredly, many times she had to keep her eyes down to hide the brimming tears.  Now her stepfathers name was a funny one to American ears, and always provoked a laugh, while her own family name was not funny.  Yet because the man had shown her a little timid kindness, she faithfully bore his name, and through storms of jeering laughter, clear to the dismal end, she called herself Semantha Waacker.

Once we spoke of it, and she exclaimed in her excited way:  “Yes, I am alvays Waacker.  Why not, ven he is so goot?  Why, why, dat man, dat vater Waacker, he have kissed me two time already.  Vunce here” (placing her finger on a vicious scar upon her check), “von de mutter cut me bad, und vun odder time, ven I come very sick.  Und de mutter seen him in de glass, und first she break dat glass, und den she stand and smile a little, und for days und days, when somebody be about, my mutter put out de lips und make sounds like kisses, so as to shame de vater before everybody.  Oh, yes, let ’em laugh; he kiss me, und I stay Semantha Waacker.”

The unfortunate man’s occupation was also something that provoked laughter, when one first heard of it; but as Semantha herself was my informant, and I had grown to care for her, I managed by a great effort to keep my face serious.  How deeply this fact impressed her, I was to learn later on.

Christmas had come, and I was in high glee.  I had many gifts, simple and inexpensive most of them, but they were perfectly satisfactory to me.  My dressing-room mates had remembered me, too, in the most characteristic fashion.  The pretty, woolly-brained girl had with smiling satisfaction presented me with a curious structure of perforated cardboard and gilt paper, intended to catch flies.  Its fragility may be imagined from the fact that it broke twice before I got it back into its box; still there was, I am sure, not another girl in Cleveland who could have found for sale a fly-trap at Christmas time.

The straightforward one had presented me with an expensively repellent gift in the form of a brown earthenware jug, a cross between a Mexican idol and a pitcher.  A hideous thing, calculated to frighten children or sober drunken men.  I know I should have nearly died of thirst before I could have forced myself to swallow a drop of liquid coming from that horrible interior.