feet and settled down for a pleasant time. And, of course, young Bingo had to make an ass of himself. His voice suddenly shot at us out of the darkness.
“Ladies and gentlemen, something has gone wrong with the lights—”
The Tough Eggs were tickled by this bit of information straight from the stable. They took it up as a sort of battle-cry.
Then, after about five minutes, the lights went up again, and the show was resumed.
It took ten minutes after that to get the audience back into its state of coma, but eventually they began to settle down, and everything was going nicely when a small boy with a face like a turbot edged out in front of the curtain, which had been lowered after a pretty painful scene about a wishing-ring or a fairy’s curse or something of that sort, and started to sing that song of George Thingummy’s out of Cuddle Up . You know the one I mean. “Always Listen to Mother, Girls!” it’s called, and he gets the audience to join in and sing the refrain. Quite a ripeish ballad, and one which I myself have frequently sung in my bath with not a little vim; but by no means—as anyone but a perfect sapheaded prune like young Bingo would have known—by no means the sort of thing for a children’s Christmas entertainment in the old village hall. Right from the start of the first refrain the bulk of the audience had begun to stiffen in their seats and fan themselves, and the Burgess girl at the piano was accompanying in a stunned, mechanical sort