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174 ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN'
Glasgow pantomine. That was an ever-memorable engagement for me because on the opening night I sang "Roamm* in the Glomin' " for the first time. If "I Love a Lassie" had been a great success under similar circumstances five years before this new lyric was a triumph. It captivated the public ear as no other song of mine has ever done — or will do until I come to sing "Flower o' the Heather." I had kept it up my sleeve for a year or two before producing it. I rehearsed it ten thousand times ; I worked on it every day and often in my bed at night. I tried a dozen different costumes before I decided how I would dress for it. I studied each and every syllable of the words, every note and intonation of the music. The song was an obsession with me for months and months. I remember crossing on the Lusitania once with Lord Northcliffe and among the many interesting things this amazing man told me was a little story I have never forgotten. It was about a small shoemaker who invented the tags for bootlaces and made a fortune out of his notion. "How did you come to hit on the idea of putting steel points to the ends of laces ?" Lord Northcliffe asked the shoemaker on meeting him many years afterwards. "By thinking of nothing else than boot laces for twenty years !" replied the inventor.
Well, I thought about nothing else than this song from the evening, a year or two previously; the title came suddenly to my mind. I had been out strolling in the cool of a fine summer night near my house at Dunoon. Every now and then I happened across a couple of lovers linked close together as they slowly "dandered" along the road to Inellan in the gathering dusk. They were oblivious to everything save the sweet nothings they whispered into each other's ears. The words of Burns came back to me as I passed first one pair and then another :
If heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare,
One cordial in this melancholy vale
'Tis when a loving, youthful, modest pair
In other's arms breathe out the tender tale
Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the evening gale.