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.