During that first season she learned to manage her affairs and to take care of herself and her small belongings, without admonition from any one. At the same time she was learning much of the technique of the profession, and was deeply interested as she began to understand how illusions are produced. She declares that one of the proofs that she was meant to be an actress was her enjoyment of the mechanism of stage effects.
"I was always on hand when a storm had to be worked," she says, "and would grind away with a will at a crank that, turning against a tight band of silk, made the sound of a tremendously shrieking wind. And no one sitting in front of the house, looking at a white-robed woman ascending to heaven, apparently floating upward through the blue clouds, enjoyed the spectacle more than I enjoyed looking at the ascent from the rear, where I could see the tiny iron support for her feet, the rod at her back with the belt holding her securely about the waist, and the men hoisting her through the air, with a painted, sometimes moving sky behind her.
"This reminds me," says Miss Morris, "that Mrs. Bradshaw had several times to go to heaven (dramatically speaking), and as her figure and weight made the support useless, she always went to heaven on the entire gallery, as it is called, a long platform the whole width of the stage, which is raised and lowered by windlass. The enormous affair would be cleaned and hung about with nice white clouds, and then Mrs. Bradshaw, draped in long white robes, with hands meekly crossed upon her breast and eyes piously uplifted, would rise heavenward, slowly, as so heavy an angel should. But alas! There was one drawback to this otherwise perfect ascension. Never, so long as the theater stood, could that windlass be made to work silently. It always moved up or down to a succession of screaks, unoilable, blood-curdling, that were intensified by Mrs. Bradshaw's weight, so that she ascended to the blue tarletan heaven accompanied by such chugs and long-drawn yowlings as suggested a trip to the infernal regions. Her face remained calm and unmoved, but now and then an agonized moan escaped her, lest even the orchestra's effort to cover up the support's protesting cries should prove useless. Poor woman, when she had been lowered again to _terra firma_ and stepped off, the whole paint frame would give a kind of joyous upward spring. She noticed it, and one evening looked back and said; 'Oh, you're not one bit more glad than I am, you screaking wretch!'"