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THE PRINT OF MY
REMEMBRANCE

AUGUSTUS THOMAS

MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTESS

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND NUMEROUS
DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

NEW YORK • LONDON

1922

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Printed in the United States of America

TO BRANDER MATTHEWS

DEAR BRANDER,

The publishers are doing all they possibly can to
a success of this book — they call it a book — and they
asked me for a dedication.

After the manner of mid- Victorian poets, I could
made the dedication mysteriously to "Dear I

M ," but I used to know a girl of those initial:

wife also knew her. Her name was Mary Brani
But nobody of intelligence is going to be deceived
mere transposition of initials, so I thought I migh
as much as I stood to lose by coming right out w
and saying Brander Matthews.

I learned in the railroad yard that separate cars tl
in on the same track could subsequently be couple
then hitched to something with power enough to
or pull them out as a freight train; perhaps with
ful attention to the English market I should say, "
train/5 Nobody knows better than yourself the <
ence between push and pull, and having both you ;
be willing, I thought, to assist a fellow who has ne
especially as my cars when they are not empty cc
stuff that is perishable.

Then I had another idea. There is a story of G<
Custer at the head of a marching column on our Am<
plains one day in the middle seventies. He sud
threw up his hand after the manner of Western
manders, gave a signal, and moved sharply "cc

dried Drusn was me nest ui a, mcauuw -
was frightened and had flown, but the ne
eggs in it.

At the head of the marching column of re^
gesture has all the authority that Custer's ha<
troopers, and you have the same sympatheti
sion of possibilities. Many readers will i
infer the low and defenseless character of m;
incubations when I simply say Dear Brandei

And some critics are as gentle as cavalrym
Affectionately yours,

AUGUSTUS

NEW ROCHELLE, N. Y.

CONTENTS

I. A CHILD'S IMPRESSIONS OF CIVIL WAR DAYS

II . A PAGE BOY IN THE MISSOURI LEGISLATURE

III. MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON . . .

IV. ADVENTURES OF A PAGE BOY IN CONGRESS
V. GROWING UP IN ST. Louis

VI. ARTS AND THE THEATRE

VII. NEW FRIENDS AND YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS

VII 1. THE THEATRE AGAIN

IK. THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB

X. ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD

XI. JOURNALISM IN ST. Louis

XI L Two PULITZER PAPERS

XII I. NEW ENTERPRISES IN KANSAS CITY , , .

XIV. JULIA MARLOWE AND OTHERS

XV. MAURICE BAHRYMORE AND "Tim BURGLAR"

XVI, GATHERING PLACES OF THE ACTORS , . .

XVI L SOME NOTABLE MANAGERS

XVIII. THE EARLY go's

XIX. SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA

vli

VIII

CONTENTS

XX. GAMBOLS AND TRAVELS

XXL To COLORADO FOR NEW MATERIAL .

XXII. IN PARIS

XXIII. SOURCES OF INSPIRATION ....

XXIV. "THE WITCHING HOUR" AND OTHERS
XXV. INFLUENCES: BOOKS AND MEN . .

APPENDIX

INDEX . .

ILLUSTRATIONS

Augustus Thomas Frontispiece

T /-> rr^T T FACING PAGE

imogene Garrettson I nomas, mother of Augustus Thomas, at
eighteen years of age ' ,

Sarah Wilson Garrettson, Mr. Thomas's grandmother, in her

fifties I0

John W. Norton g0

John Peck Colby, father of Mrs. Thomas. 1865 . . . . no

E. B. Thomas, father of Augustus Thomas. 1865 • • • . no

Cartoon drawn by Mr. Thomas for the St. Louis World in 1880 124

Two scenes from "The Professor," in which William Gillette

appeared. 1882 138

Delia Fox and trie curl she made famous 156

The Dickson Sketch Club, at Minnehaha Falls, Minnesota.

1884 162

Edwin Booth as Hamlet 230

Julia Marlowe as Juliet. 1889 248

Maurice Barrymore in 1888 262

Augustus Thomas in 1888 262

Charles L. Harris and E. M. Holland as Squire Tucker and

Colonel Moberly in "Alabama" 294

Charles Frohman 302

Caricatures from Mr. Thomas's Sketch Book. 1891-93 . . 326
L. J. B. Lincoln, F. W. Ruckstull, Augustus Thomas, E. W. Kemble,
Francis Wilson, Frederic Remington

Caricatures from. Mr. Thomas's Sketch book. 1891-93 . . 424

Sydney Rosenfeld, General George Sheridan, William Marion Reedy,
Cyril Scott, Henry Guy Carleton

tin n;i\ i < n MY iii'

< i\ it, v* \j; nvi

t ji* *

2 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

the second time the question of the liberty of the ne
slave, Dred Scott. Mr. Lincoln, at Springfield, \'
anxiously awaiting their decision before expressing hi
self as he subsequently did in such immortal fashion

On the eighth day of that month, in that year, I v
born in a little house in what was then the outskirts
St. Louis, Missouri.

Of this important concurrent event none of the gre
personages above referred to knew anything at first har
which must not fairly imply neglect on their pa
because all of my own impressions of them were su
sequently and slowly formed on hearsay and report,
mention these great personages principally to fix in t.
reader's mind some conditions and the time. But th<
are mentioned, also, because most of them began sex
afterward to take place and shape — somewhat distort<
shape, perhaps — in my first permanent memories.

Buchanan took office under the handicap of our fami.
disapproval, because responding to certain preelectic
pledges he permitted the recall from Falmouth, Englan<
of my maternal grandmother's second husband, who ba
been sent there as United States consul by Frankli
Pierce; and, without generalizing too hastily, I may sa
that a similar lack of judgment, according to my peopl<
characterized nearly the whole of Buchanan's adminis
tration. Grandmother was there with this second hu$
band. I don't know how the wife of a consul at Fa]
mouth could do it, but in some way grandmother, whil
in England, arranged a presentation to the Queen, s<
that with us in North St. Louis, Victoria was a householc
word.

I was two years old when John Brown was hanged
and, of course, understood nothing of it. Victor Hugo

I t

4 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

meaningless sound of f Grant/ which seems to have some
trouble with another called 'Fort Donelson/ There are
shouts and salvos, and mingling with the cheers there is
the derisive song:

" 'It was on the tenth of May,
Captain Kelly was away,
The Hessians surrounded Camp Jackson/

"Years afterward I learned that the Hessians were
the loyal Germans of St. Louis, who under Francis P.
Blair marched to her defence.

"Another happening of that Homeric day is a fair
where my mother holds me high in the crowd that I may
see a child impersonating the old woman who lived in a
shoe, and had so many children she didn't know what
to do. That little girl with the cap and spectacles is
Nellie Grant, selling her dolls to buy clothes for soldiers;
and now there drifts into my ideas vaguely the concep-
tion that this echo, this shibboleth, this Grant is a man,
a father, not nearly so kind and low-voiced as my own
father, not so tender, nor so full of laughter, nor so long
away from home as my father, but still a father, tangible
and human, and maybe good to that little girl at whom
the men and women wave their handkerchiefs.

"Then there is the illumination, when the night is
come. The candles stuck in potatoes behind the tri-
color tissue-paper in the windows; and the tar barrels
are crackling in the street. Suddenly all is dark. I am
frightened by an undefined menace. The young mother,
in her night-robe, is kneeling with me at the open win-
dow, one blanket above us both, the sky filled with the
twinkle of the summer stars, and the air heavy with the
weedy smell from the bottom-lands of Illinois. Yet it is

A CHILD'S IMPRESSIONS

none of these, but rather a tump-tump-tump-like pulse, a
rhythm that my mother whispers is the tramp of soldiers.

44 II was the heartbeat of a startled nation. I can re-
call it now, with all the mystery and magic of the potent
and unseen, ancl It is moving to some ghostlike place
called Island Number 10 or Vieksburg, and Grant is
there in whispers.

"That is my Grant, a member of that Apocrypha of
the nursery to which belong the Bluebeards and the
Giant Killers.

"I saw him nnee, in the winter of 1870, at Washing-
ton, when the Senate and House had gathered in the
Hall of Representatives, at the funeral of General George
II. Thomas. The imperial Blame was in the chair, and
in a semicircle of seats in front of his desk were the
cabinet and a short, hitfh-siwuldered, round-headed man
with whiskers. Grunt! I felt the same shock that a
!ii t!r tfirl <>f to-dny, full of * Alice in Wonderland/ would
fed if she were shown Lewis Carroll and told, 'That is
your story/ "

Brfoir the war my father was associated with Mr.
\V. N. Wrl!% nitum^ othrts in the formation of the Re-
publican Party in the St. Louis district. They were in
(uru'.iunui onre-.jxwdrmT with Mr. Lincoln at Spring-
ing L not \rl tftr gfr;it emancipator, but just a clever
ddutrr \\ho was attracting attention in the West. One
of th«*,r nii/inal Icttn*;, addressed to Mr* Wells, not to
inv t'lihrr, is hrtwrrn two panes of glass in a frame and
11 ii*Idrr in mv libiary. It dors ru)t add much to the
\nfiititr oi !,iiu«>in's piHtiui't, but as it has been in print
onl> in ronnfvti'»u with my play, "The Copperhead/*
this cxtiait may ha\e fur many a genuine interest:

6 THE PRINT OR MY REMEMBR

""" ~~ ~1

All dallying with Douglas ay Republicans, who are
is at the very least, time and labor lost; and all sue!
with him, will yet bite their lips in vexation for their
policy which rigorously excluf es all idea of there b
in slavery, does lead inevitabfy to the denationalizat
stitution; and all who deprecate that consummati
seduced into his support, do but cut their own throat
las has opposed the administration on one measur
on some other; but while he Upholds the Dred Sc<
clares that he cares not whether slavery be voted do
that it is simply a question of dollars and cents, a
mighty has drawn a line on one side of which labor m
by slaves, to support him or Buchanan is simply t<
goal by only slightly different roads.

Very respectfull

I remember vividly incidents of the pre
paign, when I was three years old, that
coin's first election. Father and the fam
Republicans, but in my private heart I v
Bell and Everett of the so-called Union
torchlight processions were the most pictu
intervals in their lines animated men rs
with now and then a larger one on a wage
have been older spectators and auditors
pressed.

I remember the neighborhood rejoicing
tion and, very soon thereafter, everyboc
diers . singing, "We are coming, Fathe
hundred thousand strong." St. Louis,
Germans, was predominantly a Souther
vided feeling ran high; neighborhood B
intense. There was a builder named Me
other side of our street who had threai

A CHILD'S IMPRESSIONS

father. The opportunity apparently never safely offered,
but that and other hatred lasted. For example, the war
had been over ten years when on a local election day
McCormick, who was a powerful fellow, came behind
a buggy in which I sat with my father and endeavored
to overturn it by lifting the rear axle. I was big enough
to engage in the contest that followed, but the police
prevented a decision.

These Civil War events and childish impressions from
them have no historic value, but they are the stuff that
focused and perhaps formed my tendencies; the stuff
that influenced my mature associations and endeavors,
and became the background and much of the material
of my professional work. When I compare these early
influences to determine which of them was the most po-
tent in fixing whatever may be persistent in my course,
I think I must give predominance to the influence of
the grandmother already mentioned. She was so un-
swerving in her intentions toward me, so positive in her
assumptions, so constant that I remember her influence
not only as personal and intimate but also as oracular
and imperative. I have written her into three different
plays quite intentionally, and perhaps into forty others
by some indirection. I think, therefore, that a fuller
statement of grandmother is pertinent.

Her father's name was Wilson, her mother's name
was Walker — both names recently crowded from the
advertisements, but they had spirited associations even
in my childhood. William Walker, who led his filibusters
into Nicaragua, was grandmother's cousin, and she was
proud of him. Her only brother was killed on that ex-
pedition. Grandmother's first husband was Daniel
Garrettson, a boat-builder of Cincinnati. He was lost

8 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

in a river "accident while my mother was still a little

girl.

The second husband was an actor turned editor when
Pierce gave him the consulship at Falmouth. After
Buchanan's inauguration this second husband made his
home in Washington City, while grandmother lived in
St. Louis to be near us and as far as possible from him.
I remember his monthly remittances, which were regular
and not large, but beautiful. They came during the
early war period in newly printed paper shinplasters,
in sheets measuring each about eighteen by twenty-four
inches; each sheet having one hundred pieces of frac-
tional currency and each piece with a value of three,
five, ten, or twenty-five cents, according to the respective
denomination of the sheet.

When I grew big enough not to make the sport too
expensive I was permitted to cut these sheets into their
component units. Any one who has ever cut a coupon
from a Liberty Bond that didn't belong to him can esti-
mate my thrills over these small, crisp steel engravings
of historic Americans serving as scenery for federal
promises to pay on demand. A percentage of these re-
mittances each month went into the war relief of the
time. Recruits from Illinois and Iowa passed -grand-
mother's door and cheered it. The flag with its thirty-
four stars hung from her window, and whenever a march-
ing detachment swung in±o view a table draped with
bunting in her little dooryard was quickly equipped with
refreshments. Some of the fellows needed them. For
any chap especially distressed a reviving nip could be
unostentatiously produced. At that time whiskey, which
had cost eighteen cents a gallon when Lincoln kept store

A CHILD'S IMPRESSIONS

in Sanj*amon County, had risen to thirty-five cents a
gallon. You can't stop the profiteers. Between times
grandmother elk! volunteer work on uniforms.

On the mantel-shelf of the study in which I am writing
in New RocheUe is a black wooden crucifix about six-
teen inches high supported by a base. The brass figure
of the Saviour is apparently a copy of Donatelfo. This
was always a prominent object in grandmother's parlor.
Archbishop Pureell, of Cincinnati, returning from a visit
to Rome, had brought it to her when she was first mar-
ried, with the blessing of Pius IX. (iranclmof her was
then a Catholic, but some act. or failure to act, some ut-
terance or some silence by some Missouri churchman
upon the question of secession .sent grandmother over
to the M. E. Church North.

In Simpson Chapel, Union sentiments were vocal
and extemporaneous, ant! there* grandmother inhaled and
exhaled an atmosphere of militant loyalty. Twice every
Sunday and at least one night of tin* week she went there
to meeting. With father at the front, I war; the* only
male4 creature in our two households, and though mother
thought a boy of siv or seven shouldn't be tip so late, I
loved In act as the old lady's escort. The streets of North
St. I,uui»; at nij'ht were not lighted at that, period; the
chaprl was four blocks away ami the natives were not
fi fetidly. But grandmother hud a square lantern such
as iJo^brrry carries, with three sides of tin, perforated
like a hnp.eradish Crater, and a fourth side of j'Jass. It
held a candle and swum*; by a tin rin>; larger than a muffin
mold, \\ilh that candle lighted and the ri/.ht win;*; of
her Valley f;or*jc circular thrown over her Irit shoulder,
the handsome old lady, then about fifty, used to j»o forth
with me. In that fashion I be^an to save the nation as

At tnat time our nome was still in my Din
end house of a dozen called Bates' Row on Tc
brick buildings of almost toy dimensions, h<
rooms and a lean-to kitchen each, and little
back and front. Grandmother occupied the
to us with her widowed sister and a pretty n
Alice Witham. As a youngster I thought s
Sweet Alice discussed in the lyrical appeal t<
and I had Ben cast in the person of a sturdy
called irregularly until a black-bordered en^
crossed flags on it explained his absence. ."
Alice still disconsolate as a handsome youth,
in the same row and not quite old enough fo
except as drummer-boy, which he was for a
under her window. The police then tolerate
turnal custom. This singer was J. K. Em]
sixteen years old at that time. Grandmot
him when he sang, as everybody did, but at
he was on her bad books. His sister Eliza
tralto voice as fine as Jo's tenor. Eliza sai
son Chapel, and Jo, who came to take her ho
then, preferred to practise jig steps on the
in front rather than wait inside, where vocifr
and grandmother's and the little congregat
were passing swiftly by." Eliza Emmett Wj
one of the notable singers of the city. With
Our Fritz, the women of two continents fell
true to precedent forgave completely his ma

Grandmother's opinion was the most dec
family. I had no way of knowing it wasn't i

_____ A CHILD'S IMPRESSIONS 11

tion. Her impatience with McCIellan and Grant and
even Lincoln seemed to have an effect. At any rate,
things happened when she got mad enough. She per-
manently affected my early admirations. After a sol-
dier, an orator was the finest type. She had heard Web-
ster in the Senate and Andrew Jackson elsewhere, and
gauged my early diction by those standards. As I re-
view it mentally, I think there may have been a little of
the theatre about her, but it was good theatre; a sense
of the effective, nothing of the insincere. In her prophecy
I joined her strangely assorted gallery of the great, and
always found her hope and her belief associating me with
Jackson and Webster, Lincoln, Edwin Forrest, Char-
lotte Cushman and Archbishop Purcell. It was a good
deal to ask of a lad of seven, but I took a run at it.

My father, as a bachelor aged nineteen, had gone to
the Mexican War via Leavenworth on the historic Doni-
phan Expedition and during the subsequent experience
was an aide-de-camp on General Taylor's staff. He
sustained there an injury that disqualified him somewhat
from extended service when he raised a company of
volunteers for the Civil War, and therefore as soon as
the immediate menace to Missouri was past he resigned
from the army, and was elected to the Missouri Legis-
lature. When Farragut ran the blockade at the mouth
of the Mississippi and took New Orleans there was a
demand for entertainment by the Northern troops who
occupied the city similar to the demand that came from
the American Expeditionary Forces recently in France.

Father thereupon resigned his seat in the legislature,
and together with Ben de Bar, one of the foremost comic
actors of America, the only great Falstaff I ever saw,
and a manager named Tom Davey — who subsequently

YYcto Aii. WAV* JL^V** -- - - -^ * -

Revel family, dancers and acrobats, and among others
a comedian named George Chapman.

Although New Orleans had fallen a year before, the
Mississippi for much of its length below St. Louis was
sporadically commanded by Confederate guns, so that
this little theatrical company had to run their blockades
on a steamboat protected by piled-up cotton-bales.
There was a long, successful season at the theatre, which
those lessees closed at the end of March in 1865. I dis-
tinctly remember my father's return, bringing with him
a large cage holding two mocking-birds, which had to
have boiled eggs, and also carrying several bunches ; of
bananas protected by pink mosquito-netting. A third
item in his baggage was a box of photographs of theatrical
celebrities who had been visiting stars at the theatre.
Among these were some pictures of the talented and
eccentric Adah Isaacs Menken. According to my mother,
these photographs did not warrant my father's estimate
of Adah's beauty. I remember the pictures too imper-
fectly at this date to umpire the difference of opinion.

Another attractive photograph was that of a young
woman in a pancake hat, a short smart basque and a
wide expanse of crinoline. She was the gifted Mathilda
Heron, mother of Bijou Heron, now Mrs. Henry Miller,
and grandmother of Gilbert Miller, who has recently
been announced as the manager to succeed the late All
Hayman in charge of the Empire Theatre, New York.

There were a half dozen photographs of a singularly
handsome man, each of them inscribed "To my dear

A CHILD'S IMPRESSIONS

Torn"— -my father's friends called him intimately by
last name in preference to the given one of Elihu
signed John Wilkes Booth. Although my father was
years Booth's senior, he and Booth had been rather I
companions in New Orleans, and coming from the s
theatre, wearing the same kind of mustaehios and
clubbed hair of the period, were so alike that each
sometimes mistaken for the other.

Father had not been back long enough at our St. I
home to lose the guestlike novelty of his presence, v
on the morning of April fifteenth, something having j
wrong the day before with the family baking, I was
from the breakfast-table to the corner grocery foi
extra loaf of bread. The weather was unusually \v
for that season, even in St. Louis. Saturday was a sc
holiday. I was barefoot in the first kid freedom of
year, and snail-like on this errand I travelled the s
block over the unpaved road, which was ankle-deep *
its coo! bed of dust.

At the grocery I was unable to get attention in
group that had gathered there and was increasing,
soon as I learned the cause of the excitement I ran h<
burst into the little dining-room with a repetition oi
cry *4 Lincoln's been shot I"

I can see the family at that table now, each in h
her proper place, as definite as if the occurrence* *
to-day. My mother and father, my cider sister at
younger one, a baby brother, my grandmother, w
hired girl. It was the democratic custom in that; set.
and time for the hired girl to serve the food in bulk
then sit with the family at the table. My fai
refusing to accept my message, rushed to the sirec'

14
see

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

scc the terror on my mother's face and the tragic in-
tensity of grandmother. I am pressed with questions.
I remember my inadequate replies, and then my father
coming back, his face grown strangely older. ^As the

women look at him he says, "Wilkes Booth-

"Shot Lincoln?"

"Yes."

As the women get this confirmation my mother sobs
with her head upon the table; grandmother, erect, is
making short dramatic denunciations, of which I have
forgotten all except their vehemence. Not only that
day but an ensuing period of dislocation and excitement
followed; a period recalled as interminable compared
to the swift actions that the records show. During that
crowded time every word of the reports in every paper
was read aloud and discussed; every rumor too. The
subject occupied the talk and filled all minds through
every silence. The apprehension and arrest of conspira-
tors; the pursuit and killing of Booth; the arrangements
for the dead President's funeral; the trial of persons
charged with complicity in his assassination; bitter divi-
sion on the question of the guilt of Mrs. Surratt, and
upon the right at all to hang a woman; suspicions that
arose and were increased concerning Vice-President John-
son's possible knowledge of or blindness to the plot ban-
ished all unrelated topics. Letters came, neighbors ran
in and out to carry or to match their news. Persons here-
tofore uncertain as to policies took a prompt stand in
condemnation of the deed. Many Southern sympathizers
honestly arranged themselves with the Northerners;
some sullen ones closed their blinds and kept out of view.
The excitement extended to the children; and picture
papers were cut out, pasted into peep shows and reeled
off in soap-boxes, back-lighted by bits of candles.

A CIIII IVS IMPULSION'S t*

The death of Lincoln came with crushing force to every
household in the North. To these ours was an exception
only in the added poignancy ^ivrri by our iainiharity
\\ith tin* assassin's name and luuks ami my fatlicr's rtv-
olhvtitjn^ c*f a rtvcnt playful co!npani«»ns!up, Bunth's
}-ihiilrnp-*ajiliH wore hn.nij»ht out, tli-A-ir^irtl in iniiriir anti
thru put nway aiul uvoiiletl. In the next year or twci,
thrfnig.h the willing agency -nf secesh playutates, I cjuirily
Itiivr these pictures to other parents who pri/.od ami kept
them.

\\1irn Line* >Infs funeral was held at SpritvJifli! theu-
was a eerejn«iny in St. Louis, \\ith a stately tepie .entati\e
catafalque set in the rotunda tit the i I;t •* teal euiiif fit MI* <%
where thousands with I»owed head and revetent -trp
passetf t<.* express (»penly their -out»\\. 1 ua* in that
line* and though no tii»uht Inithfullv inf«»uued at tin*
time* for year*. I retained the- fnlir! that Linii»Iu"'» I»»dv
had Keen under those U^wer; autl j],i,, . 'Ilute niiir.t
have Lent many who thought the same.

A PAGE BOY IN THE MISSOURI LEGISLATE

Soon after that time my father was planning and si

veying what was called the St. Louis and Glencoe R£

road. There was an onyx quarry at one end of it— 1

other end, I think. Grandmother called it a mare's-ne

which seems to be bad rating for a new railroad, a

father suffered in the enterprise in other ways. He t

to go to New York about bonds and money, ^and tc

me with him to Brooklyn, where his sisters lived.

that visit I learned that father himself had a mater

grandmother, who before her marriage had been a N

La Farge. It required half a day to get from Brook

by ferry-boat to New York and by Broadway stage

her house in a thinly settled district near Central P

in the East Sixties. She spoke with a French accen

difficult for me to understand. The only topic on wl

we got earnestly together was the Civil War — gra

mothers seemed to be unanimous on that — but she

a dark and very old lady and in no wise comparabL

my grandmother. I felt sorry for father, but was car

never to say anything about her that hurt his feelin

We went back to St. Louis. An older railroad n

the family said, named Colonel Tom McKissock,

euchered father out of the Glencoe Railroad, and in

historic apportionments McKissock joined Buchanan

There was in those days a touch of economical man

ment by my mother that will appeal to two classe

readers. The first it will impress with mild astonishir

and the second, millions in number, if the statei

A PAGE BOY 17

should reach them, ft will strike familiarly. The flour
for the baking came in coarse cotton sacks. These sacks
when empty and with their seams ripped open washed
up into serviceable domestic cloth. For the five chil-
dren in our household in 1868 this cloth was available
as nightgowns. Sometimes the brand of the flour sten-
ciled into the bag was indelible. One dealer, dyeing for
immortality, identified his product by a pardonable pun
which had for my parents a third application, gratifying
though not prophetic, as they watched me bundle into
bed with The Flower of the Family blazoned on the
southern exposure of my gabardine.

In similar ways and by like episodes my neighborhood
horizon widened and took on state and national dimen-
sions. Among father's optimistic friends was a man
named Cavanaugh, with whiskers and blue eyes and a
broad broken nose. Mr. Cavanaugh never put water in
his whiskey, as General Frank P. Blair and father did
while conversing at the Planter's House bar, but drank
it with a nervous toss and considerable display of teeth
under his wet mustache and then thoughtfully went
"Ha" with a sandpaper exhaust.

Then and again, years and other years afterward,
standing at the same bar, I tried to dramatize for my
own mind's eye the story of General Frank P. Blair,
smiling and unarmed, saying, oh, so confidentially, to
another man he had never met before: "Are you Billy
Ryder? Well, I'm told you say you will kill me on sight.
My name is Frank P. Blair, Mr. Ryder."

"Right where we're standing," Cavanaugh explains,
and Mr. Blair laughs it off and says something amusing
about a bluff.

Billy Ryder was a political Monk Eastman. As a

jLi£>Lemiig, rime years 01 age. nven at sixty-
four I like it.

My father was a fine man with a great brain, and now
that he is gone I would say nothing of him that could
prejudice a reader against him, but he always treated
me as an equal. I knew his friends man fashion. They
were many and important, and such informing anecdotes
as the one just related he always told me in order that
I might rightly measure men. On all public questions
there was always also grandmother, sometimes mistaken
but never in doubt, and from the time I was eligible at
six years of age until the time I was indigent at twelve,
I had an almost uninterrupted attendance at regular
sessions of the St. Louis grammar-schools, including at
that ^ period their compulsory study of German. When
I finished I had a card publicly given me for my recita-
tion of Marco Bozzaris. The scene is indelible. I had
walked to the teacher's platform, as was then uniformly
required, on tiptoe; we thought in order that our shoes
should not squeak too much, but, as a matter of fact,
to train us against falling arches. I see my teacher now,
the bunch of lilacs on her desk and just behind her the
Tropic of Capricorn. It had been there all winter, but
never so plain as on that fragrant morning in the spring
oi 1868, with the girls in white and ribbons, and through
the open windows trees and grass and cowbells, and be-
yond the sky-Ime of a great round world turning upon
its own axis once in every twenty-four hours, except in
February, which has twenty-nine. The safety of our
republic rests upon our public schools.

, and now
;hat could
fs treated
3n. They
anecdotes
)rder that
questions
mistaken
eligible at
at twelve,
it regular
Juding at
n. When
ny recita-
[e. I had
uniformly
our shoes
jr of fact,
,cher now,
id her the
inter, but
the spring
d through
>, and be-
ling upon
except in
^y ojf our

our plunder there were a few book-shelves well furr
and some other volumes with bindings too dilapi
to be shown. These cripples drifted to the garret, ^
I used to run across them on holidays. Three of
old books I studied with keen interest. One was E
"Rhetoric"; a second was Jefferson's "Manual on P
mentary Law/5 which had evidently been useful to f
at different times; a third was a small copy of Hai
"Military Tactics."

About this time the remittances of new money
Washington City began to get irregular and no^
then to lack a few sheets of the stipulated limit, t
be accompanied by peace-offerings of useless merchai
stuff that the sender had probably got at little cost
a War Department that was reforming. In one
ment of that kind there came a pasteboard box coi
ing a gross or more of officers' epaulets in gold and
on different colored cloths, ready to be sewed 01
shoulders of soldier coats. Nobody wanted these t
apparently, not even grandmother, and they fell t<
Nothing would have been more acceptable except
haps a consignment of Indian war bonnets. I distri
them among my comrades, and with the help of the
dee "Tactics" organized two or three squads, fairlj
ficient in the manual, with wooden guns, but com
entirely of officers from brigadier-generals to cap
When manoeuvring in the streets and encouraged b^
erans at the corner grocery we must have looked 1
miniature and migratory general staff.

This would be too trivial to record were it not fc

20 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

fact that it was at a time when two national convention
had made their nominations. With the entire countr
still wrought up and resentful over the assassination o
Lincoln, the Republican Party took no chances on th
character of its candidate, and General Ulysses S. Gran
was the nominee. His Democratic opponent, Governo
Horatio Seymour, of New York, had smirched his recon
a little by addressing an audience of draft rioters in Ne\
York in a pacificatory speech as "My friends."

To offset the doubts which that phrase inspired, th

Democratic convention gave Seymour as his runnin

mate that gallant Democrat of undoubted loyalty c

whom I have already spoken, General Francis P. Blai]

My father was so fond of Blair that, partisan as he wai

it hurt him to oppose him in the local districts, but h

vigorously did so. I was by this time taking a wide

interest in politics and on higher grounds than those whic

I held in the Bell and Everett campaign. But still th

theatrical features of the contest were the ones that ir

terested me most.

In the torchlight processions the marching voters, b<

sides their soldier caps and capes, wore little aprons, b<

cause their candidate, U. S. Grant, when a boy, ha

worked in his father's yards as a tanner. More than i

any other district that I have ever observed, and moi

than in any other campaign, the juniors took an intere:

in this one, doubtless because of the contentious atmo

phere in which they had all been raised. The men ei

couraged them and there were many marching clubs <

boys. My organization of shoulder straps was actr

two or three nights in the week at the tail end of the ta:

ners5 procession.

It is probable that neither Seymour nor Blair, expe]

A PAGE BOY 21

enced politicians as they were, had much hope of elec-
tion. At any rate, upon many occasions in which I saw
him soon after the decision, I could discover nothing
crestfallen about our Missouri member in particular, nor
did he carry any animosity against the comrades who
had remained loyal to the commander in chief rather
than support their local favorite. Blair and my father
were warm friends as ever, and Blair himself was in-
fluential in having me appointed a page in the Missouri
legislature the following session, at which time I was
eleven years old.

There were five page boys in the Missouri House of
Representatives at that time. They were appointed by
the clerk, and there was considerable political compe-
tition for the places. As the boys were paid ninety dol-
lars a month, the appointments came under the head of
patronage. There were plenty *of competent lads in Jef-
ferson City who would have been glad to get the work
at twenty dollars a month, but under the spoils system
the clerk endeavored to distribute the appointments
through different sections of the State. The salary was
fixed upon the knowledge that the boys would be under
considerable expense away from their homes, and per-
haps the committee on appropriations justified the
amount also under the theory that the work was educa-
tional and to a boy the opportunity would be a kind of
scholarship.

Any man who can remember working as a page boy
in any legislative body will approve this theory. Every
session was punctuated by points of order from the mem-
bers and rulings by the chair, and perhaps because their
attention to these contests was not so divided a$ that
of the members, the boys were better average parliamen-

pencils, a fcuppij ui 41^11 y^c, s>- * -

man still provides for Richelieu, and a pocket-knite to
keep these pens in order. The same allotment was made
to every official employee and to every member. In
excess of this the members received a supply of black
sand, for which a box sat on each desk. Most of the
members preferred blotting-paper to the use of the sand
boxes, but as blotting-paper was a novelty some of the
old men shook sand on to their wet letters and then shook
most of it back again into the perforated lignum-vitse
boxes. I remember the page boys laughing over an edi-
torial comment of one of the St. Louis papers concern-
ing the city's oldest representative then in the house, a
certain erratic Doctor Smythe. The paragraph said:

Doctor Smythe writes his letters with a lead-pencil and uses the
blotting-paper, which he says is much superior to the old sand.

Our duties as page boys were to carry a bill or a reso-
lution from the member who introduced it to the desk
of the clerk who was to read it aloud; to take messages
from one member to another or to go to the other end

of the building on some errand to the senate; or to one
of the departments under the same roof. We were sel-
dom sent outside of the capitoI. We were not always
busy and our leisure naturally fell when the members
themselves were most engrossed; that is to say, when
something of real interest was proceeding in the house.

There were generally two sides to every question that
came up, and it would be difficult to conceive of any
method more instructive than that with which the boys

I 1.

24 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

That winter of '68 in the Missouri legislature, oi
which John D. Orrick was speaker, is notable for three
events: The Fifteenth Amendment, giving the vote tc
the negro, was adopted; Miss Phoebe Couzins, a prettj
girl, then in her twenties, just graduated as a lawyer
addressed a joint session upon the question of female
suffrage; and Carl Schurz, at the end of a spirited joim
debate, was elected to the United States Senate.

Miss Couzins made a pretty picture as she finishec
her address to the legislators, and with a graceful wav<
of a white-gloved hand closed by saying, "Let it b<
flashed across the continent that Missouri leads the van
and the nation must follow."

In Broadway parlance of to-day that would be callec
hokum, but at that time every listener, to use anothe:
phrase, ate it up. Opinion on the policy was divided
but nobody doubted Missouri's ability to lead the van*
Phoebe Couzins, the first woman to hold a Federa
executive appointment, served during President Arthur*;
administration as deputy for her father, who was Unitec
States marshal for the Missouri district, and upoi
Major Couzins' death the President appointed her t<
the office. She was an earnest suffrage advocate fo
years, and an ardent prohibitionist, but before her deatl
in 1913 her accumulated experience, and it may be he
wisdom, led her to oppose both measures.

Carl Schurz electrified his hearers. He then had beei
only sixteen years in America, during which time he ha<
rallied his German-American fellow citizens to the sup
port of abolition, ha£ served with distinction throug]
the Civil War, had acquired a perfect mastery of th
English language, and as he said to his fiery little op
ponent in the debate, Senator C. D. Drake, who chal

me mcinners 01 me senate crowueu iiuo me larger nouse
and the lobby holding on its full benches more than one
distinguished man who thought the lightning might
strike him. I remember first seeing at that time the
romantic-looking David P. Dyer, the scholarly John I;.
Benjamin, and ex-Senator John B. Henderson, who lie-
cause of his vote in the United States Senate against the
impeachment of Andrew Johnson was no longer accept-
able to liis Missouri constituency as United States sena-
tor, Mr. Henderson was the author of the Thirteenth
Amendment, which in regular form made Lincoln's pro-
claimed emancipation part of the Constitution. At one
stage of the proceedings in these joint debates, in re-
sponse to many calls for an expression, Henderson, in-
stead of taking the speaker's rostrum as Drake and
Schur/. had done, arose* modestly from a chair well back
in the chamber, and beginning to speak in playful fashion
moved with much charm and persuasiveness to such
dangerous ground that the partisans of the more promi-
nent candidates broke in upon his address.

The page boys* hours were about nine to four. We
liked to sit up late occasionally but not repeatedly, and
in front of the Wagner House, where I roomed with an-
other boy, the local statesmen, when the weather per-
mitted, had a convention fashion of holding group con-
sultations on the* sidewalk. My first active service* as
a member of the Vigilantes grew out of that. Our or-
ganisation was not extensive, containing, in fact, only
this other boy of about my own age, Robert H. Cornell,
now a prominent citizen of St. Louis, and myself.

mash we compressed moderately into missiles of the size
of a football. Our rooms were on the top floor of this
five-story hotel. At what seemed the proper hour for a
curfew Bob would lean from one window and I from an-
other and at a concerted signal intrust these heavy and
mushy bundles to that power described in the Newtonian
law. Under favorable conditions one of them would
cover an entire committee meeting. We had to judge
the effect of our attack only by what we heard, as by
the time these things had travelled their distance we
were back in bed. It was a disgraceful and lawless pro-
cedure and we both deserved the house of correction at
least, but now that I tell of it under the protection of
the statute of limitations, and think of the frequent pro-
tests against the destruction of our national forests, I
am not sure that any other equal amount of paper pulp
has finally performed more useful service.

Another source of annoyance on these open-window
nights was a card-room behind a saloon extending at
right angles to the rear wall of the Wagner Hotel. We
couldn't reach or appeal to these offenders with the lit-
erary matter that was so useful in front of the house, but
the Wagner Hotel dining-room was separated from its
supply department only by a wooden partition eight
feet high. As Cornell was the lighter of us boys, I used
to boost him over this partition when the help had re-
tired, and from the inside, standing on one of the shelves,
he would procure and pass back a hatful of raw eggs.
At the rear of the hotel on every story, there was a
Southern gallery or porch.

A PAGE BOY 27

The one on our floor commanded the tables nearest
the door of the card-room just mentioned.

Oliver Herford once answered a lady who asked him
if he had any one unsatisfied ambition in life by saying
that he had always wanted to throw a raw egg into an
electric fan. I have never seen that done, but I am sure
that whatever would be lost in mechanical regularity
from that reaction is fully compensated by the human
interest that can be elicited by two raw eggs suddenly
exploded in a pinochle foursome. Let me say to any
immature readers that this was very reprehensible con-
duct, and that on my part there has been complete ref-
ormation.

I cannot speak so hopefully of Cornell, because when
I last saw him in 1917 he was trying to sell real estate.

The year before this one at Jefferson City parts of
Kansas and a part of Missouri had been seriously over-
run by a plague of grasshoppers. The United States
Government had sent a distinguished entomologist by
the name of Riley to study the conditions. I don't know
what Mr. Riley was recommending to the legislature,
but at the Wagner House dinner-table, where for a few
days he had a seat next to mine, he advocated eating the
grasshoppers. He used to bring to the table a paper-
bag, holding about a quart of them, roasted and but-
tered. These he put on a platter and was just as un-
selfish with them as a dog is with fleas. Very few of his
neighbors joined him in their consumption. I ate two
or three and found that they tasted not unlike peanuts.

As I try now to recall the impelling motive of this
courageous deed on my part I think it was a combination
of curiosity, a wish to please Mr. Riley, a desire to re-
port the occurrence at home, where it did make a sensa-

28 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

tion, and also my recollection of the Sunday-school ve]
which I used to recite about John the Baptist's lit
for them. Perhaps it was the absence of wild honej
our table that accounts for my lack of sustained ent
siasm.

The old capitol building of which I write was destro
by fire in February, 1911. It was of the dome-and-wi
type, like the National Capitol, and stood a few \
dred feet nearer to the river than its handsome succes
and on a bluff. The muddy Missouri rolled almost
neath, and wild woods and bushes were on the oppc
bank, where we looked for Indians and sometimes
them, but disappointingly reconciled and orderly,
our bank one day my father, who paid us a visit
session and from whom until his death I was always
ting some new glimpse of a varied experience, poi:
out to me, on the Missouri Pacific track below, the
where in 1861 an engine and baggage-car had stoj
after a record run from St. Louis to unload some
self-organized patriots who came with revolvers
clambered up the bank Indian fashion just as Gove
Claiborne Jackson and a majority of the legislators,
were trying to pass an ordinance of secession over £
buster of a loyal minority, took to their heels and
souri stayed in the Union. Father was one of that
load.

My father introduced me to the Honorable Er
Wells, then a congressman from a St. Louis district.
Wells had some boys himself. One of them, RoIIa \
when he grew up, became mayor of St. Louis.

If a man likes your dog heartily he probably owns
A father of two boys is an easy acquaintance for
other's boy, I don't think I was especially forward

A PAGE BOY 29

after two or three talks with Erastus Wells he had prom-
ised me to do what he could to get me a pageship at
Washington. He sicked me onto D. P. Dyer and John F.
Benjamin, who were also visiting Jefferson City, and told
them I was Tom's boy. As a result all of the nine con-
gressmen from Missouri signed my application for the
place.

Ill

MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON

A powerful publisher in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
when he knew I planned to write these recollections,
sent a word of caution to me by a friend. He didn't
come himself. A rash or inexperienced or undiplomatic
publisher, seeing a sign, "Angels Wanted," might have
rushed in; but knowing that Napoleon even in his high-
est power sent M. de Narbonne to represent him at
Vienna, this prudent printer, moving by indirection, said
to his ambassador, "Tell Thomas to raise a mustache in
his story as soon as possible." By which he meant, get
through with his boyish memories briefly.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, one morning in
1858, said to his fellow boarders: "My hand trembles
when I offer you this. Many times I have come bearing
flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you
this poor, brown, homely growth; you may cast it away
as worthless. And yet — and yet it is something better
than flowers; it is a seed-capsule. Many a gardener will
cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee,
but he does not love to let the seeds of his rarest varieties
go out of his hands. You don't remember the rosy
pudency of sensitive children. The first instinctive
movement of the little creatures is to make a cache, and
bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and terrors. I
am uncovering one of these cades"

Some day when my Philadelphia friend outgrows his
timidity he and I will meet, and not chiding him openly

MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON 31

for this threatened surrender to the material rush of his
generation and his calling, I shall say: "Is your great
paper, founded by a great, unhurried American phi-
losopher, read principally in subways and on commuta-
tion trains or in simple households after nightfall, with
mother and the children near the lamps? And what
are the passwords to those family groups?" I shall show
him those breakfast-table lines of Doctor Holmes and
remind him also of some religionist who somewhere said
to somebody in what must have been a mood and mo-
ment of great intimacy, "Give us the children before
they are seven and you may preach what you will to the
adults." Give us the sensitive and malleable retentive
soul tissue when it is tender and impressionable and later
try what intellectual veneer and overlay you like.

I shall remind him of weary little Dick Whittington
day-dreaming on the wayside boulder and listening to
the distant London bells; remind him of the German
manikin Diogenes Teufelsdrockh in the sunset with his
porringer on the coping of the orchard wall at Entepfuhl.
I shall say: "Recall to your mind Sir John Millais' can-
vas, famous by the personal question of those enter-
prising soap-makers, showing the English boy on the
cottage doorstep in rapt wonderment at his iridescent
bubbles." I shall say: "Think of the face of Richter's
Neapolitan Boy — of the unutterable poetry in the eyes
of the winged youth between the supporting knees of
Dore's grim-sculptured Fate; think of Eli's little kneel-
ing Hebrew protege listening to answer, "Speak, Lord,
for thy servant heareth/ " And I shall say: "Except
for your inhibiting honk about a mustache I would have
opened my heart to that subscribing brood around the
family lamp. I would have given the high sign of

32 THE pniM

brot!u'i!>^- !;i '•"
who kn»»w *'•*' *; '• *
and \\!^» t-ft :j" " ;-
of Kiplin/1-- A',A*:,i.

°AV,!V: .

I \v«nt!«l !--i"'C- ! ! ; *

thr«»U;-!l tv- •»:•:;. •' .

mr vj;m t-i ": < - : '
the s.ilu .-J- v < ; ' •••
dusk in a t» :r. -•: • s.
thiiu: likr t;..4s i • .
wouldn't lu-iir", r f : A*
sippi Kivrr MI ;i i- •<
gahlr atlit t .>•;!*! !• .'.

<>f lu'l" ln»lf; U:r!.i*-- '---

coming in was thr /ir

But

oUluTli II\i !' I» *••

only then !>t»v.» i "
thr Afcifrlir,% ll.- H \
scores tif i»ih< » , .,,,
shore, and liui,r * * !
such stunts ;i* \I. ' ..
the hearts ni f j .nu!..
types of till1 a-- 1 *'
business mm \.t
tax, I \\anini \n i*

MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON 33 \i

that is good enough for a play about Colonel Jim Bowie, j

who got a big steel file from the engineer on the boiler j

deck and ground it into a knife with which he killed the $

other man in a duel on an island where the boat stopped |

to let them fight it out; a bigger knife than Buffalo Bill I

had in his duel when he killed that Indian chief, while $

both their fighting crowds looked on — A good friend j

of mine when I got to be a man. I hope I don't forget :|

to speak of Buffalo Bill later. i

In the early winter of 1870 I left St. Louis for Wash- i

ington City, after getting a letter about it from Mr. {

Wells. I had a funny little sole-leather trunk of anti- \

quated pattern, of which I was told to take good care, j

as it had held father's luggage when he went from Chi- ;,

cago by the Fox, Illinois and Rock rivers with a group f

of pioneers who founded Winona, Minnesota. At the
O. & M. depot in East St. Louis father gave me into the
care of General Blair and his friend, Mr. Cavanaugh, i

who were going on the same train. I am not sure f'

of Mr. Cavanaugh's business or his exact relation to
General Blair, but I have recently seen something like
the relationship in that of Mr. Steve Reardon to Georgia
Cohan: unswerving admiration and solicitude, coupled
with a capacity to give comfort in times of threatened
depression. Along with General Blair and Mr. Cavanaugh
were two others whose names I forget, but who owned
the poker chips and parted with them only temporarily.
I can't remember General Blair as playing. He was early
pointed out on the train by some who knew him,, and
many passengers introduced themselves, so that his trip
was a reception for most of the way*

On our O. & M. and B. & O. trains there were no din-
ing-cars, no automatic brakes, no system of heating ex-

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

cept the stoves, one to each car. We stopped twenty
minutes for breakfast, dinner, or supper, and with no
uncertainty about dinner being the midday meal, and
into the high-toned heater the porter fed anthracite coal,
the first I had ever seen.

The engineer whistled one short sharp call for brakes,

with staccato repetitions in moments of emergency, and

then blew two reassuring toots for their release.^ Five

blasts then, as now, sent back the brakeman with his

red flag and track torpedoes when we made unscheduled

stops, and four whistles called him in. There was no

auditor on the train and the conductor unprotestmgly

took money where the tickets had not been provided.

The trim of our sleeper was of black walnut; the
upper berths when closed had flat surfaces, angular cor-
ners instead of the slightly convex mahogany boards
that now furnish them; and when open they were not
held down with the wire cables that now anchor upper
berths. That security was introduced in the late seven-
ties, after an upper berth in an overturned private car
had shut up and smothered its occupant, Mr. Taussig,
the treasurer of the old Kansas City and Northern Rail-
road. In this old-style Pullman the rails for the curtains,
stout horizontal bars, ran the full length of the car on
each side, supported by uprights at each section. The
water in the wash-rooms did not flow under pressure as
now, but at each basin passengers worked a brass-and-
ebony puinp handle. Watches were to be set forward
nearly an hour to adjust the difference between St. Louis
and Washington City time. In our party there was un-
certainty about this interval, and I recall the astonish-
ment of the men when I calculated it for them mentally,
as the dullest boy or girl in our Webster School class of

MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON 35

_ \ ,

fifty would have done, and in order to do so knew, of
course, the meridians of the two cities in the problem.
I couldn't do it now without complete quiet, a large atlas,
and paper and pencil. Can any settled citizen do it, or
has any the needed items of information except perhaps
Mr. Edison?

At Washington our B. & O. train on that earlier B. &
O. Railroad was some hours late, and arrived in the col-
lection of sheds that then did duty as a station a little
north of the Capitol somewhere near midnight. My
father had arranged for me to board with an army friend
and printer companion of his, Major Stone, popularly
known in St. Louis as Fighting Harry Stone because of
his gallant conduct at the battle of Wilson's Creek, when
General Nathaniel Lyon was killed. Harry Stone's wife,
who was a friend of my mother's, had been Alice Buck,
a celebrated soprano associate upon concert programmes
with Eliza Emmett, the talented sister of the famous
J. K. Emmett already mentioned. Mr. and Mrs. Stone
had three children. One of the daughters, Patti Stone,
became well known in light opera on Broadway in the
early nineties; a son, Blair, became a star acrobat.

In this winter of 1870 patriotism, rewarded by a job
in the public printer's, took Mr. Stone to Washington,
where he found for his family a house on F Street near
Fifteenth, in what is now the Shoreham Hotel district.
Before leaving St. Louis I had taken the precaution to
find a map of Washington City in the public-school
library and get a fair idea of the relative location of this
address. A December rain was falling as General Blair
and his group of politicians came from the station with
me. I saw the looks of amusement on the faces of his
friends as they considered the General and his embarrass-

36 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

ing protege, and was quick to tell him I thought I could
find my way if he would start me right as to the points
of the compass. There was a little council between the
men, and after further insistence on my part I was put
alone into a bobtail car drawn by a mule and carrying
a Slawson box for the passengers' fares, all reassuringly
like our St. Louis horse-cars.

Upon my arrival at the house I was a long time waking
the family, and was finally admitted by Fighting Harry
himself. He sleepily showed me to the room that was
to be mine and said good-night. I don't think at any
time in my life since has there been an equal feeling of
loneliness to what I then had as I put down my bag and
took off my wet clothes in an unheated room. The house
had only open grates, and there was no fire for this be-
lated guest. As I stood on the sagging mattress to reach
the gas-jet when I turned it out for the night I found
that I was still a little seasick from the oscillating beau-
ties of the Susquehanna Valley.

The next morning, one of those crisp sunshiny winter
days that Washington can show in early December
cheered me completely. Mrs. Stone I had known as a
neighbor all my life. She gave me a hot breakfast passed
from stove to table just as my own mother would have
done it, and I set out for the Capitol in the best of spirits.
I knew which was the House end if I could strike the
familiar view shown on the two-dollar bill on which my
father had indicated it. I soon found this, and the door-
keeper, Mr. Buxton, was expecting my report for duty.
In that handsome Hall of Representatives, at ten
o'clock on that morning, there were besides myself
twenty other page boys. The layout of the place and
its relation to the larger building conformed with the

MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON 37

understudied impressions I had from the State capitol
at Jefferson City, but on a scale of true magnificence for
which I was unprepared. I think the Capitol at Wash-
ington is the only building I ever saw while a boy which I , ,
after a lapse of years did not seem smaller on a second <*
view. At that time it fully symbolized what I felt was / .
the grandeur of the nation and the power of the Govern- i
ment with which I was officially connected. '&

When the House assembled at noon in its semicircle i

of dignified desks and chairs, with aisles converging at
the tables of administration, I felt more at home than '*

I had thought I should. \

The statesmen of that day were the successful soldiers
of the earlier part of the same decade. In that historic /

Congress of reconstruction there were more than a dozen *'

faces with which I was already familiar by their por-
traits in the heavy album that stood on the little oval
marble-topped table in its place of honor in grand- J

mother's parlor. Among those whom I soon identified
were Generals Banks, Logan, Butler, Schenck, Garfield,
and Slocum. I do not name them alphabetically, but as i

I see them now in a mental picture of the chamber, read-
ing from left to right as the modern group photograph
instructs. j

That night as I sat at supper with Fighting Harry r

Stone, the grand army comrade of these heroes I had
left in the Capitol, and felt myself the son of another J '

soldier and prompt fighting man off there in Missouri I !

so undeniably of their company, too, I refrained from -j-l

all mention of the close association, but in my heart I j *

longed for a confidential and glowing hour with grand- ^

mother and her noble gallery. *;

All of these fellow page boys of mine were away from C *

38 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

their homes proper and many of them without super-
vision. It was a rule of the then superintendent that
each boy should take two baths a week in one of the sev-
eral large bathrooms provided for the House. An adult
interpretation of Article VIII of the Constitutional
Amendments made things easier for the statesmen them-
selves. These bathrooms, of which there were four or
five, were built of marble, with a tub cut from a solid
block, the cavity of which must have been quite eight
feet long and proportionately wide. A boy of twelve or
thirteen could take a good swimming stroke in one of
them. In the winter these baths had a touch of regimen
about them. The tickets, two a week, were issued on
certain days at the doorkeeper's desk and had to be re-
turned by the attendant in the bathroom as used, but
it wasn't always possible to make the lad to whom the
ticket was given take the bath it called for. And so as
the weather grew warmer— and it can grow warmer in
Washington— and as the asphalt began to run — and it
does— the boys with hotel tubs sold a government ticket
now and then to a comrade not so well fixed.

This is the time for me to state a fact heretofore with-
held because its earlier telling would not have been an
economy of attention. Grandmother's second husband,
the Honorable Augustus Wallace Scharit, was the half-
brother of my father, born of an earlier marriage of
father's mother. A. W., as he was usually called by our
family, was about fourteen years father's senior, and
being at once his stepbrother and by marriage his step-
father-in-law, bore to my father a complicated relation-
ship that made father's qualified support of A. W.'s wife
in the differences between that pair difficult for A. W.
to tolerate. These two half-brothers were not hostile,

MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON 39

but they had little correspondence. I had been in Wash-
ington only a fortnight when a letter from father with-
drew all implied restraint and gave me A. W/s address.
My short note to him — I was his namesake — was an-
swered by a call at the Capitol, and A. W., of whose dis-
tinguished bearing any boy could be proud, took me to
his home and arranged for my stay there during the rest
of my time in Washington.

In appearance A. W. strongly reminded me of Carl
Schurz, minus the whiskers; the same alert, wiry figure;
the same brow; the same full shock of hair; the same
tragic directness of glance and an actor-orator's de-
veloped power in the mask. He lived apparently alone
in his own house and took his meals at the table of an
attractive widow whose house adjoined his in the one
detached garden of some two hundred feet frontage next
to Waugh Chapel, on North A Street, three blocks east
of the Capitol. My meals were arranged for at this
widow's, and as the widow had a son the prospect was
agreeable. The experience did not disappoint the
promise. This boy, then at the age of fourteen, was
being trained for the stage. For some reason of her own
his mother gave him the invented family name Palmoni.

A. W. took a deep interest in him, and while I was
there generally had me share his theatrical lessons. A.
W. was encouraging to me in his early questionnaires,
and was especially amused with my giving grandmother's
version of Charlotte Cushman's reading of the lines, "In-
fix m of purpose ! Give me the daggers." At unexpected
and genial moments he would sometimes even ask for
its repetition. Until then I had not suspected that
Lady Macbeth was anything of a comedy part.

In the rear of the acre garden was a stucco stable and

MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON 41

any of the three roles named could I trace an identifying
resemblance between Mr. Davenport and the handsome
steel engraving of him in the part of Benedick that was
in the 1855 edition of Ballon9 s Pictorial.

In that meeting Mr. Davenport said nothing that I
remember about his son Edgar or his daughter Fannie.
I had no way of foretelling that I should one day know
and admire them both and be friendly with them, or
that his younger son, Harry Davenport, probably not
born at that time, would be a member in my company.

Among other theatrical friends who came there was
the actor James Murdock, whose recitation of "Sheri-
dan's Ride" made the popularity of those verses by
Thomas Buchanan Read.

Another visitor at A. W/s table, Margaret Meade, a
distinguished spinster, aged perhaps fifty years, brought
with her sometimes her two adopted daughters, who,
however, retained the family names of their dead soldier
fathers. One of these girls, two or three years my junior,
was named Marie. I have forgotten the name of the
other. Marie, not yet too old to slump on Miss Meade's
lap and lean her blond head against her guardian's lace
collar, had steady gray eyes, big as an Angora cat's.
She almost made me forget the thirty-year-old Sunday-
school teacher who had owned my heart since I was eight.
Margaret Meade had two religions — Catholicism and
her distinguished brother, General George Meade, of
Gettysburg fame.

Margaret told us one day that while the Battle of
Gettysburg was on, its uncertain tide in ebb and flow,
she had gone to the White House and sent her card in
to Abraham Lincoln. When admitted she asked the
President if he had any word of the issue. He answered no.

40 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

carriage-house some three years old, finished perhaps
about the time that the paper money remittances began
to be irregular. It had evidently never been used as a
stable, but was what the contractors call broom clean.
A. W. helped the boy and me rig it as a little playhouse.
There was a box of army things in it which came in use-
fully and reminded me to tell A. W. of my having got
the shipment of epaulets. He affected astonishment
that grandmother had not wanted them — at least wanted
a pair of them. Among this army stuff were two sabers
that A. W. had cut off to a proportionate length and with
which he taught this boy and me such broadsword exer-
cises as would be useful in the theatre.

For that family playhouse I did my first dramatic
writing. It must be truthfully told that it was largely
in collaboration. Having seen two performances of Mr.
Joseph Jefferson's "Rip Van Winkle" I made from
memory a juvenile condensation of Mr. Boucicault's
book. As author I cast myself for Rip and my boy friend
played Nick Vedder.

Few dramatists begin with more distinguished even
though unwitting collaborators than Dion Boucicault
and \\ashington Irving. With the insistence of A. W.,
I also tackled Sir Walter Scott, and made a workable
dialogue of the principal conflicts in "The Lady of the

ayed Roderick Dbu>

p " rehearsed ^ in the

between Brutus and Cassius.

At the widow's table, where he was A W's truest I

L a

> Hamlet, and Sir
him dosely> *« neither as himself nor in

42 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

She said: "Neither have I; but I'm George Mead
sister, and I thought you might like to know that wh
ever he undertakes he carries through."

It was small assurance, but there arc crises in wh;
even a word from a courageous heart is of help. Una
thanked her for her call and said it had been of comft:
My own anxiety about Marie lasted longer than 1
Battle of Gettysburg, and nobody helped any.

During all that season about twice a week A. W. tci
the other boy and me to the theatre, and was a!w«
particular when the curtain fell after an act to indici
what he thought had been excellent in the perfonnan
At that time the street-cars from the National Thea
stopped at the west front of the Capitol To roach hoi
we had to circle its big hill on foot and walk three m<
blocks to the house. One jolly winter night, after a p
formance with a stiff north gale in our faces, A. W. tci
us boys both up this hill, one on each side, comploti
covered and protected under a great black broadck
circular, with velvet collar and throat clasps of sib
lion's heads linked together, a counterpart of the <
that grandmother wore in St. Louis. Both were of Hi
lish make.

O uie individual nies, so that each member
of the two hundred and twenty-six then there, as he came
to the daily session, found under his desk the measures
that would come up for consideration. On the busy days
work was generally through in an hour, and on' other
days there was nothing to do, which gave us always two
or three hours before the gavel fell at noon.

The official guides now in the Capitol had not; then
seen appointed; the page boys took visitors to the points

- a of
than the rotunda
for Geor

only

Crypt> Several aoors '""'IT
y the "^ as a tuml,

at that time oly
paU that five years befo

placo
a"d s"ml"'

eyerj- visitor had one

Nearly

V P. *T, , t

Ll > *

H, r

. !-, ill! ,Y T ,

\ .1 if, ?1< *

' », \ !^ j,^;!J

• * !:, All M!«?I !

1 i c ' ' » * ! ! p j i u

!,<•'»!',.: ,-'

» "U f I flit
ll.i' ,1\r ',' . «'

^1. '!!»•;, 4, \{

"fca" vr'«*' V'

I i 4Ai* , * r | * j'\
> r . '.",• .»J Ir

!;'H4lr l|*t valitf
?' fr»*(f . J, ,t."i !«i Kuot» lit * ijir
i {»» uiiili if *,*Mhlif Itr irfrilnf
j*iMin»f« of thr ^jirrilir that

\ ji:ii4 if it4 JM/r . !<* f^* t*fl ttlth
Vf In «<t4lrr ill. tf t!*r Iiiilitlitl

3 <' ;tt *JKiiff I ;HJl! ,,lil*A \4ftilr

)jk»-j|«! !*<" iii!ii4ii\r. Ant!

i ! iillr „ lltr V*»*|tl
ifir htUJri N "UJit i i

v.<- ,';n Di-i' \c.
It v «, : ,,

n»i*n u j »ti t ' • •

brfnu .(!'••
of tlu- < ! . <

and *<; .jii]' ,
t*;u-h !<* tl't • .t
int. Our -. , , J
annthri v «' 1 i ,
liani, \\niilii v t-,
yell pnint . n| i,«,'
as niiH'li t Hri T i

r.'v fiifiiiv ii: it ^
i i ,

ntiVs.

r ,.t,tnr i, .r

session that \isjtur, 0| r,lit
us^t it. I'msi '

tat ion I ever li<-;ir,J a,.,v (, , , ,( '
m-causY it is so n-!:,»,.,i ,,'. .

JU'tcr and in tinu- I h,^,. { 'r.t. '-.",. '

ii'oin its dciWivti date uf I. '

was very rt-sju-ctiuilv „!},'! .',! ,*-" '
o< men at a small clinnrr-,. ,',•"., ' '"

i .

„ 4 , « ^ 5 * ;, r V «* 1 ' , ,. 1 1 1

.! V .- I - . '•• .I." . »i

, IS. ', 't'l ;• .''. --a

• t ,- •• ,:- t- ; " hr

, -. ' • 1 » ^ t

lacuon, a!ld •,!: • ,'. . .
Mr. Uiyrv/ . '

script!' »n «•! t • » I

givc-n mr aj .- , •

teds I Mr ,1 ti"' ! I .

Iti^uhltM.^ \ , Jf^ M

j)r\\ \ su f < -,!
iMnri'SMii1', l! r ^
nl tht* v, hitr I . * ' ,
If;;riu! of l.M.i-1 4 j
Mr. DtpcV*. * i i,

(Inscriptions *,f manm

itsrlf in the iiiim! *it ,
juditvd l)ny. iii:i\ n,,i
Miff by anothrr r\.i
of Daniel \\VI.sirr in i

does not roiiu*?

t4Hr pauses, put .
think thru thi-iv \^i%
not; then Iu- jmts |IK
l»'s brrast uiulrr hi-, v
to tlie bottom ofliis !<

IS hound to COinr; }ir

«>«H*S with a Inip. an
on thoScnatr."

Mr. \VVhsttT coult!
Ocnoral Benjamin I
similar conditions, (
the proper word, whi

I :

V 1,

h u

, i -

5o THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRAN^^

stay after school. The members departed until only
three or four were in the chamber finishing some belated
correspondence. Among these was General Butler at
his desk. The doorkeeper told me to follow him.

When he reached the desk he said, "General, this is
the boy who has been making those caricatures/"

The general laid down his pen, looked up either at me
or the doorkeeper— he was very cross-eyed— and after
an intimidating pause, rose to his feet. 1 watched both
men. I won't pretend to interpret what passed between
them.

The silence was broken by General Butler saying,
"Go to the cloakroom and bring me my hat and cloak/'

His cloak was a military cape, not so large as some I
knew; the hat was of the kind subsequently called the
Hancock because General Hancock wore it long after it
had been abandoned by others: a high, soft crown, with
a stiff, sharp, uncurved brim of felt. The gentleman
from Massachusetts took his hat, regarded me calmly
for a moment, blew his soft cheeks with a sudden puiF,
as John Drew does when making a comedy point, and
then dropped the hat over my head with the brim rest-
ing on my shoulders. I can still revive the reeking berga-
mot with which it was redolent. My mother had used
bergamot on my curls, and grandmother's antimacassars
smelled of it. After a time of penance beneath this

snuffer, where I feared to move, I heard the general's

mushy voice:
"When you can fill that hat, young man, you make

caricatures of General Butler."
I was sent home for the day with a caution from the

doorkeeper instead of the dismissal I had earned. I have

always remembered this act of generosity to a fresh kid

52 THE PRINT OF MY

to interrupt in the cause of decorum, Imt tin* : rnr ' il
disposition was to let Mr. Butler unsuer. (*t»\ t""k hi .
seat amid a buzz of expectancy. (leiuTal Bnflt t !«> ^rJ
over at him with that ambiguous i\:nc I Ita\r irii IN -I
to, paused for a moment while the silomv fell, aiul I hi t%>
half turning away as though the \\Iiofr <•]»!• ndi v, in-
closed, and with a wave of his left hand in d*',n«ir».«d ^1
the little member from New York, he v.tid: "1 v. .»*:•.*
reply to the gentleman as any ne\\sU>v on thr 'tn<!
would answer him, 'Shoo, fly, don't bothn utr, f \1-
Cox was on his feet in an instant, \\ llli a \ $ »l!i MI! 1 1 * •" f
bitter and extended, but unheard by an\ < \i» nf f1^ -
nearest him as the House and the gullrn i» » • <il w t1:
laughter, and as the nation did the follow in;; tfa> ,

On strictly party measures the Dcntoeiut . \sri«* »r-
capable of any action other than to pn*h 1 1 tl^ii n-* .o i
The country paid more attention to the d;iff\ J»I.M ir !
ings of Congress then than it seems to mm, ami mi all
important questions the votes were pubfrfud, Dm ^
crats, unable to make a dent in the su-am-iolln pi,,. ir%%
of legislation and unwilling to listen to inurlt uf tlr de-
bate upon a measure, frequently passed tin tiuu- at ih.i^
poker.

General Robert C Schenck, of Ohio, uhn onlih,-,! ih,-
rules of this noble national game, was a ,„«.,»!«-, ,,|

, ,„«.,»«-, ,, ttt

Congress, and his very presence was a t,mMant „.,««.,!,-«
of the recrea

, resence was a t,mMant „.,««.,

of the recreation Just across from tlu. (: ilnl ,

w <>f Poker outsic!,- oi ( ih.n

were conducted there

ADVENTURES OF A PAGE BOY 53

whatever was in hand and in the language of the spright-
lier symbolists do a Paul Revere to the Casparis House,
and the adjacent committee rooms in the Capitol itself;
to dash without ceremony into the rooms where the men
were handling the chips and pasteboards and cry,
"Calling the roll on the admission of Virginia/' or what-
ever the measure happened to be. The players would
then make the best time possible to their places in the
House, where it was each member's privilege before the
vote was announced to get the recognition of the chair
and have his name, which in the case of his absence had
been called twice by the clerk, again repeated and his
answer registered. The roll call began with Adams, Al-
lison, Ambler, and so on, and proceeded alphabetically.
We could generally get our reserves into the House as
the clerk was doing the Whitmans and Wilkinsons. The
telegraph thereupon carried to his district this evidence
of a member's vigilance which cost but slight interrup-
tion to the game.

On one of these Marathon round-ups I made my last
call at the room of the Committee on Indian Affairs.
This committee was not in session; but two or three
members, including Mr. Cox, were sharing with some of
the visiting Indians whose claims were before the com-
mittee a bottle of fire-water. Mr. Cox, who was just
my own height, but protected from page-boy calls by
as many whiskers as Secretary Hughes, did not need
support; but he threw his arm around my neck, partly
as a result of the entertainment they had been sharing
and ostensibly to show to the petitioning chiefs that
even a little boy was safe with him. The other arm he
threw around the waist of Red Cloud himself, who on
that formal visit was in buckskins, blanket and feathers,

soun, down the miuucoioica c
of Jefferson and past EmanucI Lcutze's mural painting,
" Westward, Ho I " We would have so appeared upon the
floor if a doorkeeper in Grand Army uniform had not
helped Red Cloud and me to get away.

Night sessions were pretty hard on the boys. \vc had
come from school and home life, where though tiu!
mothers would shepherd us at bedtime, and the night
session, with its droning monotony of soporific drivel
intended only for print, would sometimes lag on until
two in the morning. There was little for the page boys
to do at such a time but sleep on the marble stops ui the
Speaker's stand, so we took turns at night duty in squads
of seven. These sessions were always thinly attended*
Sometimes the attendance was so slack that it was im-
possible for a self-respecting orator to maintain the pre-
tense that he was in any way persuading his colleagues.
It was then within his right, if joined by a definite num-
ber of others, to demand a call of the House. This call
was made by a sergeant-at-arms and his deputies, which
force was for the time increased by the use of the pages
present and on duty. Each was given a list of absent
members with their addresses, and while the night ses-
sion took a short recess these process servers moved
throughout the city, hunting the delinquents.

On one of these calls my list contained the name of
General Butler. He had a residence then somewhere in
the neighborhood of the old Arlington. It was a snowy
night. Although his house was brilliantly illuminated,
I could make no impression with the front doorbell.

A1H 1 \!f KI'S OF A PA(,K BOY

MIWN;« 'r
ju!l»p*iih
thr buiM

hunt

,it l!

!»»,

v,n, ai-i »tra:*ts \\rrr

tin i.M LimS-antl- A iu«

', I ttrpt |a tilt* f«!r uf"

thr u»uu*i, a pi«»ti a<liu(

Irtitn , a * » ,• :MI. tia«ir. 1 la I)tii,;!.t** I .tit I»,tnL'»

valin^, pu I m . * .i-1 j.-.i at ti ,t! tin«r i«rn zun, hn! tlu-tr

V, rir | r! *ja! r .jn" -« * » t . i>\ } ,/TK ? it", and r! c-\\ hrir that
hi-lj'rii t. » H» , t ! ?M thr t»'jt **i f*i ', 4 <I»J", . Ill l«u* M! ihr
liiilhaalK hf 5 :» •! i »•» 11 4* ml ( H MM.I' Il(j!ri al thr hrml
uf a tai>!r - Hn««;tr'«,r*i 5\ -,* n 1 ^ffi m i»i t\*«rnt\ ifinn
hrl % nf C « *; j r . ,, ji I«P* nl ; ' ^ ! j } A j , .M j »ii «ril tu «.< t*
ill -a** h a «4.!.r i *a' »»» 'ji^t aMi i ! h« 1! l^f.Iilr a!tilu«!r
III thr 1 I» ' . * , i 1 r 1 1 »» .*! h ,* I < !i .apj M an » 1. (,'*»{( rr t tijr*
an»f ii ;; ,!\ ! r.^^.'.M AM* » »t1 thr 4.f*»!!i anil a inir <li*.
pla'* ««t ;l* • *. >,i«', ^si'^r:!, v/h»» !:* !;!»! ha*, r an/Aijrd
ihr *!u*.j nil */,iji ",Jat*'!«ii,4 a,ainJ tiir v.all; all \\rir
r\ iifriit)1' *'Lf^ * ta< a-i|.

It v. a-, a \t*A i,»iau!f* !>c!»iir l!i\ tnli! tapping uii ihr
\^intl*»'i', , »*} a" -.<! i»»!j a:*'M f!n% \M *!*!'* ;tni! Iaut hfi^l,
amf t*«rfi \il\f l'» r\ Haun 1 t.tmr in lliiuii^ji ihr tiprii
\\iu«l»rA \.Illi l« *, tUU.rK »«n;r nu'*"«.if,r. Ol!r O! t\\u uf
fhr i:,rin! ri '< , • »? up a . if t»* «*!*r\ llir4 ia!!, hill t*n thr lid-
ihr «»f (i»anal H»<tlii flit"' tiMttftn! ffirii **rat . ant! I
v a^ M-iil !»ii I ! ^ irp**il p!t», ir'/». At that tiiiir ihr ni!r
**| fht* !I» .;->r i,Mil»»» ,nl a fnir ul trii cfttflai Ini .1 fniluir
IM it >p «i:«f |u a ^ j!L f Lr r< \t d;i\ t 'inmu;' othri i^rnf h*»
itirn. <iin ti it i »;- »*! fhr laif Ii i tliiiiiri -t;il»Ir |»a%M*cl in iinnl
uf thr Npriktti !»iir!li l»t iiiuiii ihmi dtllririit c \t usr%,

\\hni if t t."tr 1*1 tin* luiu «*{ driirta! Built r hiinsflf
i»r MUilril up a! thr jiirsiili'V. eitttcri1, ftUtl \\avillf rt new

trf^'iiuflii ,irruj.uk 'uiuh "Mr. Speaker, thru is my

r\i li *r/r

56 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

The method has been progressive. To-day, from
Washington to Reno, few excuses go better.

That Congress was overwhelmingly Republican. In
those days of the spoils system I think that very few
Democrats were upon the appointive list. Certainly
among the pages not any besides myself was there at the
request of a Democratic delegation. This fact humor-
ously and mildly singled me out for as much attention
from the Republican members as from any of the mi-
nority. One Republican, who was at times inclined to
wait until I could run his special errand for him, was
Mr. Ebon C. IngersoII, of Illinois, familiarly known to
his friends by his middle name, Clark, which is what his
brother, Colonel Robert G. IngersoII, called him.

Speaker Blaine was rather partial to Mr. IngersoII as
a chairman when the House resolved itself into a com-
mittee of the whole. As this temporary presiding officer
it was his job to listen to the long talks often made only
for purposes of publicity and requiring little activity on
the part of the chairman. As the season advanced and
the weather grew warmer Mr. IngersoII more than once
intrusted to me the delicate mission of going to the
restaurant in the basement, kept at that time by a mu-
latto named Downing, and bringing back to him one of
the tall mint juleps of which he was fond. One door to
the Hall of Representatives is immediately to the right
of the Speaker's desk. By reaching this through what
was called the Speaker's lobby a boy could pass from the
door up four or five marble steps to the Speaker, com-
pletely hidden from two-thirds of the House, and, if he
moved quietly, almost unnoticed by the rest.

Following the chairman's careful instructions I used
to wrap the glass of julep, its crown of green and its pro-

that session Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi ana
were asking to come back. In certain sections of the
South recognized government was under negro domina-
tion, and testimony before committees was burdened
with almost unbelievable stories of violence.

A most bitter speaker against the South was Mr. John
A. Bingham, of Ohio. He was a nervous man, with a
pale face that resembled the current pictures of Lord
Alfred Tennyson. His seat was in the front row of desks
immediately facing the Speaker and near the steps on
which the page boys rested. We were always in for an
almost dime-novel description of horrors whenever Mr.
Bingham began upon the subject of the unregenerate
South or the outrageous Ku-KIux Klan.

One of the most collected and methodical speakers in
that Congress was Fernando Wood, of New York; sel-
dom eloquent, never stirring that I can recall, but with
an enamelled precision and accuracy, and with that al-
most invariable note of regretful finality that accom-
panies the public utterances of our own Elihu Root.

GarfiekTs style was orotund, authoritative, Mid- West-
era and homely. He talked easily, often with one hand
in his pocket, and generally with a kind of good humor
in his manner that would have been completely winning
except for the suspected presence of a condescension not
easily separable from any genial reception of grave topics.

One member who never spoke but was always pointed
out to the visitors was the ex-champion prize-fighter,
John Mornssey, of New York.

ne coma nave taken a couple oi beaded
squaws and a band wagon and made an equal success
anywhere west of the Mississippi with patent medicine.

And speakin' again of Injuns, it is interesting to note
the debate pro and con on the measure passed at that
session to send the Indians from Kansas to other reserva-
tions and to remove the Osage Indians to a territory that
is now Oklahoma. According to current reports, in the
present year of 1921, each of these Indians, owing to the
oil struck in their territory, is individually worth thirty
thousand dollars. I have recently seen numbers of them
riding about in their own automobiles. Another legis-
lative landmark which will help measure the rate of our
progress is the law passed at that session to put a tax
on brandy made in this country from apples, peaches, or
grapes.

I heard Proctor Knott deliver his celebrated Duluth
speech in January of that session. It was unquestion-
ably the most famous speech of the Forty-first Congress.
Mr. Knott had decidedly the Mark Twain manner of
the conscious humorist. As he proceeded with his speech
and gained the confidence that palpable success brings
to a speaker, he grew even more at ease and his man-
nerisms more pronounced. In appearance he had what
might be called the Civil War make-up — plenty of hair,
worn fairly long, parted on the side, and a mustache.
The Duluth speech ran about five thousand words, and
punctuated as it was by the laughter of his great audi-
ence, laughter growing more prolonged and hysterical
as he progressed, must have in his slow manner easily

Knott began to speak page Doys were seat m V«LHWW<>
directions to call in absent members and^even to notify
the senators at the other end of the Capitol.

A trip to the Senate was among my assignments, and
I made it in great haste in order to miss as little as pos-
sible of the speech. Ten minutes after the speech began
more than half the senators were in the Representative
chamber; clerks, and employees had left the committee
rooms and supply departments and crowded into the
cloakroom. The galleries were full.

Mr. Knott pronounced the name "Duluth" with a
caressing coo that was funny the first time and grew
irresistible with the repetitions, of which there were some
fcrty-two. The Speaker interrupted him when his time
had expired, but there were loud calls from all parts of
the House for him to go on, and in the absence of objec-
tion he did so.

His ridicule defeated the measure against which he
spoke, which was to construct a St. Croix and Bayfield
railroad, but his ironical references to the future of the
city in a territory of wonderful resources, its beauty and
iuture greatness, read now like prophecy instead of ridi-

cule.

There was also a touch of antiquity for present-day
readers when in his reference to possible future amend-
ments to the Constitution that should cover the growing
greatness of this Duluth he enumerated supposititious
^vpteentn, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Articles, but
*aia oi a Sixteenth: <It is, of course, understood that

AAJLC.JL1 U.U.

None of these privileges is longer in debate.

James G. Elaine was a greater man at that end of the
itol Building than he ever became in the Senate,
active work of the larger body gave finer opportunity
Kis extraordinary power. I have seen many presid-
officers, but not any who was his equal for prompt-
of decision, clarity of its statement or vigor of its
Defense, if needed. On two or three occasions, when a
legislative measure was before the House on which he
^vished to express himself more fully than would have
t>een becoming to a presiding officer, he called a mem-
ber to the chair and went upon the floor himself. I don't
Recall his equal in that body for swift and forceful state-
ment; of his views and aggressive attack upon the op-
position.

Of all the orators in that brilliant galaxy, however, the
idol of the page boys was John A. Logan, whose speeches
did not read so well as those of more than one other, but
Ine was personally so picturesque, and the fact that he
*wa,s descended from Black Hawk and showed it in his
ta,wny skin and jet-black hair, gave him a romantic in-
terest that no other had. He had a fine voice and an
earnest intensity we liked to believe characteristic of the
I ndian, with the added fire of a Spaniard or an Italian.
And then we knew of him as Fighting John Logan too.

Mow many of those men were to us colossal from the
nation's use of them as symbols of power! General
Thomas was the Rock of Chickamauga; when Blair
joined somebody it meant that food for an army had

pion's Hill, a division thereby arrived; the enemy's re-
treat was cut off. There were giants in those days; men
more interested in the conformation of the continent
and in the majesty of the Constitution than in the dis-
tribution of garden-seeds.

When I left Washington at the end of that July and
started back for Missouri I said good-by to my uncle-
grandfather, A. W., never to see him again. I have al-
ways been curious to know what prompted his parting
gift to me. It was made with considerable impressment
— a plate of copper about eight by ten inches in size,
holding in bas-relief in the smallest agate type the full
text of the Declaration of Independence set around a
miniature circular medallion reproduction of TrumbuIPs
picture of the signing of the document, and holding in
an open margin of about an inch below the text almost
microscopic but most accurate bas-reliefs of the auto-
graphic signatures to the document. A delicate raised
moulding of the same copper framed the entire plate.
This work of art must have been the combination of
several mechanical and manual processes, and is evi-
dently one of several copies. Perhaps there are elsewhere
in the United States other men who possess this pass-
port and by its virtue belong to my lodge.

When I got home I found that my father estimated
more highly than could any boy of my age the events
with which I had had such modest association. The
more bitter rancor of the Civil War was gone; I had
witnessed the long session of the Reconstruction Con-

uisconneccea events are more
wisely associated than we surmise. A mystic that au-
tumn walking through his quiet path at Concord, from
which a specific fruit takes its name, wrote in his private
diary not meant for publication but for his own refresh-
ment only, "The grape is fruitful this year that men
may be genial and gentle and make better laws/'

GROWING UP IN ST. LOUIS

In October of 1871, three months after my return from
Washington, the St. Louis papers were filled with mount-
ing reports of the Chicago fire. Extras issued; the people
of our older and larger sister city, moving leisurely in
their dominantly Southern fashion, slowed down a little
further to discuss the alarming news of destruction in
the lake-shore town, and then waked up to a rescue as
characteristic in its impulsive generosity and dash as a
cavalry charge by Early. My interest was local and my
contributions of curiosity principally obstructive.

One idol of our St. Louis boys was H. Clay Sexton,
the head of the fire department. Sexton was the typical
fire chief of that time: red leather helmet with white-
and-gold escutcheon; flannel shirt; broad belt and
buckle; trousers in high boots. He carried a silver
speaking-trumpet presented by admiring citizens and
insurance companies. But behind the picturesque make-
up and inside the burly body there was a real man with
a brain. Ahead of the newspapers the telegraph brought
to this chief constant news of the fire's progress and the
work of the fighters; and then suddenly the alarming
report that the flames in the acres of wooden houses that
made the Chicago of that period had got beyond con-
trol by the local department. The water system was
unequal to the drain upon it. Engines able to work and
men eager to do so were without hose enough or water.

ana nose rceis, cue uruau-ureas icu,
the stock cars ready for them at the chutes, the flat cars
with skids and blocks and ties for the machines, the fast-
est passenger engines, the ablest engineers all at readi-
ness and attention. Then the call.

Daily express-train time from St. Louis to Chicago
was nine hours. Clay Sexton, with his train of stock
cars and flats, with nine fire-engines, reels, horses, and
firemen, went up there in a fraction over five hours. The
gallant feature was the readiness and the run. The work
after arrival was prosaic enough, though vital. The visit-
ing engines dipped their suckers into Lake Michigan and
fed water by constant relay to the local men more
familiar with the ground. The fact that two hundred
and fifty persons met death in that fire and ninety-eight
thousand were rendered destitute I heard many times.
The oral message was tame, however, and fleeting in
effect compared with the picture of the old General Lyon
Number 4, our neighborhood engine, 'swinging out for
her part in that enterprise of relief.

Another outstanding feature of those days is a noon-
hour book of weekly newspaper illustrations of the
Franco-Prussian War, none now definite but all making
a vague mental frame and background somehow insepara-
bly tied to an otherwise unconnected statement of General
Phil Sheridan's. The general had seen somewhat of the
French and German conduct in that war. As the result
of his observations he thought that the German soldiers
could, on equal terms, conquer those of any other nation
except the American; that the American's superiority lay

I I'

uismon even ni,',nt IK IMM • . • , < • , '

essential things fur hit:, i '! -, .«' • - , • ,

In Sheridan's belief, p«<!:t\.il fit,.' • if...],
sibility had produeed a bet!, i .- 1 | - , .. '

been at Chateau-Thirm . IV-' i , ; ,- , . \;
rate, his eommendatiim oi • >,,'• .: -' - .ii.-,,-
lasting importance in n:\ ••; «;: , ,

I hope I may tell «f an..;!-,, j r; . ,; -
million boys, perhaps nun a t' < ' , ...
determine one or tuo emhivu J.t,. < M \ , \\
Halfway up the steps to the ( ':i\,h •'
there used to he a door, '...im-tlii'i ... .:.
wherein were the imttni.-s ,,f t j ,.

of 1870. If a boy dipped hi-. Liu', '., , ,.

many jars of eopperas sulutimt i' ,< ... ... .. ,1 .' ;' ',

shelves, and let the blade diy ««},,., ,,,,,.' ..' ,-, .' ,'"
m appearanee turned to eoppei. \\ ] ,.,,' J V ' ', ,',, ' •
cally tried that on father's knife at a „, ;..».?„'„ , ,„,',, '^
tery m bt. Louis my pride was tempr««-d !., J-- , „ / { -,' •'
that the color was aeqnired, „„, ulJjLt ., t, •' , ,,!,",
luster, by the copper's eating into the Me,! ,nd , , K
slight degree dulling its edge !al

With a tolerant wisdom that uniin,,..K i,j,.,! r , ., r

until it had a full eoating of^nsc tl-a "'il1 "*'""

then with one point of a broken steel » n f ^V'^V """' '' :

my name through the black field 'IU' *nl<'

To tbs writing he had me apply a fm ^.^ ||f ^

I f

Ml
nt

wets mere, etcnea into tne Diaae 01
the owner's knife.

That year in the high school I bit a score of autographs
on schoolmates' knives. Among the beneficiaries in the
senior grade was a boy named Will Harlow. Harlow
had literary ambitions, a hand-printing press with a six-
by-eight chase, and possessed a curling, back-blown
pompadour that should have had an Eton collar with
it. He was a typical RoIIo. Aware of my ability to do
outline drawings, such as they were, and seeing in this
litho-crayon-and-copperas combination a way to simple
etching, Harlow proposed the publication of a magazine.
Together we undertook it. The magazine was named
Scratches and Sketches. We issued five numbers, I think,
at irregular intervals, approximately a fortnight, with
some paid ads — eight pages of short stories, verse and
local comment, all furnished by Harlow, and three or
four pages of alleged etchings made by me.

These etchings were done on zinc plates bought at the
tinsmith's, laboriously burnished with a hand burnisher
by me, coated with lithograph crayon, drawn with a
pen and bitten with a saturated solution of copperas.
The prints were made on superior paper as inserted etch-
ings should be, at a professional shop, and then pasted
into the letter-press stuff.

Subscriptions were few despite our courageous procla-
mations, but enough copies were issued to embroil Har-
low and me. His playful comment upon our ac-
quaintances in North St. Louis met with several demands
for retractions and apologies. Some real enmities were
established.

68 THE PRINT OF MY IU«MKMBEANCB

One bellicose warning delivered to me to transmit to
Harlow, who was keeping out of M;:ht, us gnmn-up edi~
tors are said sometimes to do, carried a descriptive word
for our magazine that stuck. The complainant \\as one
William F. Putnam, a fine youngster, uho brcamr in
early manhood an influential miller in Cleveland, where
he had as a side line a stable of trotteis, one of \\htch in
fraternal recollection lie called Cats 'Ihomas. Hilly in
our St. Louis days was a handy hoy uith Ins list--; a ^ood,
clean, upstanding, handsome lad, looking, the world in
the eye as I am sure he still does.

Holding my lapel after our second or third issue he
said, "You tell Mr. Harlow that if he e\er mentions my
name in his damned almanac ar.ain/* and M» mi.

I never recovered from **a!manae." Nine \ cat's later
in the playlet of uEditha*s Burglar" 1 had the burglar
refer by that term to the j>aper <.»f Iuhthu\ papa, and I
spoke the burglar's line myself some tour hundred con-
secutive times, but with no ultimate relief.

The rector of Grace Church in our distiict also found
some ethical Haws in our unopened policy. Thrse and
similar incidents, and the expense account, decided liar-
low's mother, who was a widow in modest circumstances,
to withhold further financial stippoit. Somt* yrais later,
when for a partner's guaranty to a. ihratiieal manager
the sheriff took our printing ofiice in Kansas City and the
ill will of a weekly paper that languished therein, the
funeral wasn't nearly so depressing as our farewell to the
"almanac."

In writing one's recollections for publication the* ex-
perienced advise cautious utterance concerning living
persons, and a news sense that shall choose as subjects
men already in the public notice. I am unaware of any

GROWING UP IN ST. LOUIS 69

notorious interest in Frederick W. RuckstuII, though I
am not ignorant of his claim upon Fame herself. Mr.
RuckstuII, who to-day is still young and a few years my
senior, is the author of that Victory monument in Ja-
maica, Long Island, against which from four directions
sober motorists used to drive on foggy nights until the
city authorities, after the manner of ruling minds in nor-
mal democracies, concluded that four iron lamp-posts
were cheaper than numerous rosewood coffins, and there-
upon set up a cordon of strong lights.

That Victory identifies Mr. RuckstuII for the sporting
New Yorker. The tourists will recall his beautiful fe-
male nude of Evening in the American Hall of Sculpture
in the New York Metropolitan Museum. Pennsylvania
has his equestrian Hartranft in front of her capitol; St.
Louis his decorative Mercury and eagle in Portland
Place; and the Southland his cavalier, General Wade
Hampton, and four or five Confederate monuments.
Washington and other cities have from his studio other
mature and classical performances.

RuckstuII, an Alsatian by birth, was brought to St.
Louis by his parents at the age of two. Fifteen years
later he attracted the attention of my father. Into the
profound talk of this wise man of forty-three and that
positive philosopher of seventeen I gradually won my
way. My father respected me — either already or still;
I had to prove it to Ruck. I wish to mark the boy Ruck-
stuII now in this year 1871, when he first comes into
my ken, because he still is there in 1921, the least deviat-
ing note in this revolving rug of life. Whenever after
any sentimental vertigo I can first get my feet on the
floor and partly retard the vibrating patterns in the car-
pet and on the wall-paper, as soon as I can locate Ruck

as n% Sir O!nc

haijfii, i'!.*. i. i * i \

chattel"* L* >r ,> • • !

ttir ,•/,„»
our rnr\! f| , , i t\
still tliiL-! „, » ,
IV;» .,;.! f ., ,,

tlf Uiuk !",! - K, **

r»tthrr Li.i 5 »• ;

would in- a I! . f (s
an !;j4iuo;».fc! t>ri , '

Ktiflfi Si. I ^ ,., • , .
CiHitT tih^jj. 1 K-1 >>

,
Mitu*«, \Wiri ,t,

Iracf fur ji»! t; Ma

tin*

s ht-r !i%* ! :^ : ^

US a JrjSrtv.s, I

\r;ii t,.f »i^r , ;,/

VMt,

came a fim* «,!ci ,

GROWING UP IN ST. LOUIS 7i

ihan in Bernard's play, "On His Last Legs/' manifestly
.dapted from Moliere's " Le Medecin Malgre Lui." Dil-
Dn's performance was a masterpiece of finish in technic,
ich in byplay and pause, and as liberal an education in
fhat added expression can give to mere lines as is Frank
iacon's "LightninV

Both Cornell and Mittens, superior in serious work as
hey were, insisted that this comedy part of O'Callaban
yas for me. The play was even then a fifteen-cent
Bellow-back, available to any buyer. We gave it many
imes in parlors, in the parsonage, in the hall over Stur-
geon Meat Market, and on the road. I shall recur to
;hat compact little two-act farce; once when it pays a
company out of Canada and once again when in ample
iisguise it rescues Mr. De Wolf Hopper from a temporary-
apse and restores him to Broadway and opulence and
natrimony. And when I do so perhaps such of my
youngish readers as continue to trail may note a con-
lection between those grown-up enterprises, running in
^he Hopper instance into a fortune, and these small be-
ginnings, like learning in amateur days a good play well.
Fhey may infer that the money side of the return is of
:he lesser worth; that the big value is the self-expression
obtained; that the debating society, the dramatic club,
the singing school, the art class, the pursuits that invite
Drain to the finger-tips, and to become articulate, are
the interests that make life eloquent. They may even
:ome to have opinions and to believe that the amount
Df self-expression encouraged and protected in any coun-
try is the measure of liberty in that country.

I shall tell stories of these adolescent years only when
the incidents are influential in later results, not simply
important to me privately, but with some color of general

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

interest or possibility of serviceable application. AH
children of parents in modest circumstances have their
trials. It is only the little rich who have the right to say
with a great American:

"Am I not too protected a person? Am I not de-
frauded of my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics
which manual labor and the emergencies of poverty con-
stitute?"

Therefore, that I took a job to write and deliver freight
notices to St. Louis consignees for the Vandalia office,
and had to be in East St. Louis to receive waybills from
an incoming train at 7 A. M., is not important. Many
another boy of fourteen years, three miles from work,
to which he must go on foot, is called an hour and a half
before the shop time. If the call is 5.30 and the season
winter, he will dress by candle-light; the kitchen will
glow with the genial presence of the stove; and the smell
will be domestic and stimulating, to the capacity of the
family purse.

But not every boy will have a frozen Mississippi to
walk over, with the Great Dipper half upside down in
the sparkled sky, holding its long pointers to the North
b*r on his left and underneath on the massive ice an
endless tram of coal-wagons with four horses to each,

At rn;-1* way the IIIinois side> while off to

te eit Eads rSe' en

t S t VV°nde,r f ^e world> arc as yet only a few

Vel.their great dam ^eakwaters
agamst tKe f«*en current, whose
Wlnf *ave piled like sculptured

can-
dnver could run ahead of his

GROWING UP IN ST. LOUIS 73

team, which would keep its place in the plodding train,
and get a drink and a thaw and pick up his wagon as it
went by.

To see the chance for that squatter barroom, to fore-
see that endless train of wagon traffic, and a day after
the ice quit moving to be out there with boards and nails;
with that degree of skill and attack and the sporting
willingness to wager this lumber and labor and a stock
of whiskey against the changing elements, indicated a
vanguard imagination quite kindred to that which
planned and set up the cantilever double span at St.
Louis or devised and drove the jetties at the Delta below
New Orleans. The difference was the trained engineer's
mathematics that Eads possessed and that Kelly had
never had the chance to get.

James Buchanan Eads, who died in the Bahamas in
his sixty-seventh year, was born on the Indiana prairie
in 1820. When he was forty-one he designed and built
that Mississippi fleet of ironclads and monitors without
which Grant's western campaign might not have been
so successful. I met him when I was a young man and
he about sixty. I remember his modest and gentle bear-
ing, and the deference that the important men of that
occasion instinctively paid him.

The years between that date and the earlier winter
when I trudged twice each day past the looming piers
of the Eads Bridge had been wonderfully filled with in-
cident for me. To relate those incidents would be un-
pardonable trespass upon type and eyesight. An earlier
writer recording his landlady's appeal to sympathy by a
recital of her history says, " It was as though a grain of
wheat that had been ground and bolted had tried to in-
dividualize itself/'

claim the nutritive percentage obtained by the process.

I recently heard a Yale professor refer to newspapers
as destructive of thought. He had in mind the gossipy
hours spent in their reading, and the dissipation of nearly
a!! serious attention on the part of those addicted to
them. Some day an equal censor may attack the week-
lies, and if we guilty contributors and readers can here
and there point to a paragraph of right intent and per-
haps helpful issue, we may quit the field retreating in
good order and not in panic rout.

Will it not be an orderly method if, reporting myself
a man at nineteen and omitting the hurtful things, I
tell those physical experiences that built a margin of
muscular gain; and if, eliminating the wasteful lures
and attractions, I recount the better mental interests
that won out for such equipment as has served in a pro-
fession that is without curriculum or diploma; and if I
can find the skill to do so without offending, may I not
imply or hint the developing factors in that third ele-
ment of human tissue which we call spiritual?

Somebody said that the military victories of England
were won on the cricket field. I believe a right American
is as much better than a similar English soldier of
equal training and experience as baseball is better than
cricicct. I wish some alchemy could give us the percent-
age ol baseball that was in the Argonne victories. I
fing ?at Cquips a b°y on the diamond,

f ^ fiHed' t0 Pick UP a batted %™™d™
a fraction of a second's wait to put it to the

<;RO\VINGJLJP IN ST. LOUIS 75

iirJit spot is^as lineal preparation for the market, the
I*at\ UK- pulpit, the forum, the surgical clinic— especially

the- surgical clinic --and the battle-field as any physical

cxi-rcisc in the world; and yet If 1 had to choose as one

who knew both between baseball and boxing I'd tell my
!x*v to box— and I'm writing these recollections for boys.
I hope the girls too, will like them, but I know a good
deal less about girls. With the fellows past forty— yes,
sa> past thirty — I don't expect to change a vote. Mr.
Franklin Haven Sargent, president of the American
Academy of Dramatic Arts, asked me some years ago to
suj'^'st any additional course for his pupils.

1 said, "Teach them to box/'

Mr. Sargent was then past thirty. Before I offered
that advice I had found in several years of professional
rehearsals that men and women, self-conscious on the
staj'.e, were so principally on account of their hands.
There is the same embarrassment in some public
speakers. The boxer is free from that; to see his hand
in front of him in an instinctive gesture does not fill him
\vith sudden fear, and if the hand as placed stands for
snwe mental attitude lie is at ease in leaving it there as
Imttf as he asks attention to that fact. The most grace-
fa! man in tin* use of his hands on the stage thirty years
iigi* was Maurice Barrymore, who had been the champion
amateur boxer of Hnfj[Iand. One of the most graceful
to-day ^ Eddie Foy, another boxer. I have never in
many talks with William Favcrsham mentioned the
subject* but I am confident that he was a skilful boxer
in !iis younger days.

My fnt her was a boxer, and despite mother's most
feminine protests he began to teach me the art when he
had to sit on a low chair to make my level After I was

76 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

fourteen there was never a time when I was not at least
part owner of a set of boxing gloves. Father's persis-
tence in teaching me may seem trivial, but will it take
on value if I can show a valid connection between it and
the important diplomatic communications of others? I
fancy I shall do that a little later.

There were two youngsters with whom I learned much
in sparring. The first and most constant one was Charles
A. Beamer, now a merchant in St. Louis and a man ac-
tive in high Masonic circles. Charley had a very effec-
tive right, and two or three times a week used to leave
my face looking like an August sunset. But better than
his right was his great good humor, and I learned from
him as much as from all others that the control of one's
temper, a prevailing good-nature, was one object of every
bout.

From the Vandalia office when I was fourteen and the
St. Louis Transfer Company when I was fifteen years of
age, I went to the old St. Louis, Kansas City, and North-
ern Railroad at sixteen. The work was principally on
the freight platforms and in the freight-yard as a clerk.
The platform men, the switchmen, the engineers and
firemen of that period were almost exclusively Irish.
The play of our resting intervals was boxing. As I de-

ITT •

veioped and grew in the exercise my opponents were
truckmen, trainmen, coal-shovellers, and mechanics—
none of them spoiled by pampering. In that K. C. & N.
yard was the second lad I refer to, one OIlie Crockett, as
handsome and as continually smiling as a lithograph of
Douglas Fairbanks.

Once in the switch shanty in my nineteenth year this
debonair youngster, half a head shorter than myself,
knocked me out with an eight-ounce glove. A report

IT"

GROWING UP IN ST. LOUIS 77

of it can be defended as a reply to the gentlefolk who
decry the brutality of the sport. On that occasion no-
thing described my own sensation so accurately as a line
in the George Ade pugilistic Fable in Slang, that "some-
body turned off the daylight." When I came to I was
looking into Crockett's smiling face and wondering only
what had interrupted our fun.

In later years and fuller manhood I had some pro-
fessional mates. I never got any medals, but I received
consoling compliments. Bob Farrell, a lightweight who
had fought a couple of good old-time bare-knuckle
matches with Billy Edwards, the champion whom the
old Hoffman House patrons will remember, was among
the number. Let me join these references pertinently.
One night after he had lost the championship to Fitz-
simmons, Jim Corbett was one of fifty guests at a dinner
to Mr. Otis Skinner in a Chicago hotel. Both he and I
had been called upon and had spoken and Corbett had
temporarily taken a seat next to Otis for a laughing ex-
change with him.

Seeing the intimacy of the two men, I took the same
chair when Corbett left it and expressed to Otis my ad-
miration for Corbett' s talk. I finished my comment by
saying with stage-manager bumptiousness, "I could
make a speaker of that fellow/*

Mr. Skinner laughed more immoderately at this than
either its conceit or its improbability called for, and then
explained that Corbett had come there the moment be-
fore to say of me, "I could make a fighter of that fellow."

Mr. Corbett was unaware both of my stale years and
my timidity; but that my estimate of him was right his
finished and artistic ability as a public speaker to-day
is proof.

78 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Professional baseball of the middle seventies differed
materially from that of to-day. It was not less rigorous
or less athletic; in some respects it was more so. The
old-fashioned pitched ball, which had more speed than
would be believed by one who had not seen the profes-
sional pitcher deliver it, was giving way to the under-
hand throw, which was probably quite as fast as the
best delivery now. No catcher, however, wore a padded
glove or mask. Little red-haired Miller, the first catcher
of the St. Louis Browns, wore on his left hand an ordi-
nary buckskin glove with the fingers cut off; his right
hand was bare. His face had no protection; there was
no padding over his body or guards over his shins. Dur-
ing the second season, facing Bradley, he introduced the
use of a rubber wedge about the size of a domino, which
he held between his teeth and let protrude slightly from
his lips. ^ This was suggested by a catcher on another
nine having had the dental processes broken by a foul
tip, and taken by the Harvard College catcher, Horatio
S. White, later dean of the university.

In those days a batter had the right to call for a high
or a low ball, and the pitcher was required to put it above
or below his waist, according to his demand. Moreover,
a pitcher once in the box went through the nine innings,
or it changed was changed for some other member of the
nine whom he replaced in his position from the in or out
held. Generally a third baseman or a fielder was en-
gaged for his ability as a change-pitcher. One or two
S attended the game> but ^y w^nt in only

f our St* Loufs >

the Chicago White Sox. One never

GROWING UP IN ST. LOUIS 79

gets this partisanship out of the blood. Only last Sun-
day the sculptor, RuckstuII, now sixty-eight, and sunk
deep in the hollow of a library leather chair from which
he was freely reading Montaigne's archaic French, paused
at some mention of memory and said: "What a heaven-
sent gift a good memory is !" And then, with an accus-
ing challenge, "Can you name the whole nine of the first
St. Louis league team when they won that first series
from Chicago in 1874?"

And trying to beat each other to it, we alternated and
interfered and reached a flushed crescendo in a run of
competing explosions, telling: "Bradley, pitch; Miller,
catch; Dehlman, Bannon, Hogue on bases; Dickey
Pierce at short; and in the field? Cuthbert, Chapman,
and — and Haight."

But we couldn't remember Chicago. We remembered
the whiskers on some of those Lake Front athletes, as
luxuriant as those now worn only by the Cough Drop
Brothers. And all the time the sculptor was command-
ing attention with a hand on which the hypnotic feature
was an ossified contusion of the first phalange of the
little finger, pitched to him on our old railroad nine of
that epoch.

A third gymnastic field is one to be noted but not
recommended. In the seven years amidst the freight-
cars and switch engines one acquires the average brake-
man's ability to get on and off a moving train. Twenty
years after I had left the service I was still annoyed if a
street-car stopped or even checked its speed to let me
either board or leave it, and then one day in New York
as a Broadway car passed the Empire Theatre, which
was my destination, I stepped from its platform onto
the wet asphalt as gracefully as the president of the con-

analogous about political platforms, but the times are
hard enough as it is.

ARTS AND THE THEATRE

My interests and ambitions were threefold— poetry,
painting, and the theatre. Let us try to agree about
poetry. Poetry is the feeling that there is soul behind
all form; such feeling is not religion, but it is the source
of religion. The difference between poetry and fact is
like a sailor's difference between the North Star and
lighthouses. The lighthouse marks the irregular and
charted coast. The North Star fixes a permanent di-
rection. Now wait a minute ! You boy in Cheyenne or
Manistee or Talladega, and you men with blue pencils, Fm
trying to tell something; nothing too highbrow for a
boy that is allowed to sit up after supper — and the some-
thing is useful.

A capacity for poetic feeling is the receiving end for
all those messages throughout life that the recurring
seasons, the grass and leaves, the winds and clouds, the
stars, the nostril-dilating odors of the fields, the hum of
insects and the sound of ocean waves are trying to get
through to us. The fogs of the rough surfaces on which
we ride obscure and hide the polar direction of the poetic
call, and we move along the prudent shore line and sound-
ings of supply and demand and cent per cent, but the
refreshing reaches are when the star is now and then in
sight.

This occasional glimpse through the clouds, which is
poetry, has been appraised by William James, our de-

it is irom nis cnapier on uic

"Most of us can remember the strangely moving power
of passages in certain poems read when we were young,
irrational doorways as they were through which the mys-
tery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into
our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now per-
haps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric
poetry and music are alive and significant only in propor-
tion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous
with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding
our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner
message of the arts according as we have kept or lost
this mystical susceptibility."

During the years leading to and including my nine-
teenth I not only read poetry; I learned it by rote when
it appealed to me, and I recited it. There is no wish to
compete with Jean Jacques Rousseau in self-abasement,
but I did recite it, in public, at church festivals and the
like. I don't defend the term "festivals/5 but the his-
toric fact is that they were so called. Once when my
friend James Whitcomb Riley and Bill Nye were jointly
lecturing, Riley, who was nervous at the game, peeped
through the curtain before beginning in a little Minnesota
lowland then hurried to Nye, who was still adjusting
his^vmte tie in the dressing-room.

"Bin!" he exclaimed. "There are only about twenty
people m the house!"

UI can't understand that/' Nye answered. "We've
never been here before/'

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 83

And now with the confession that I recited on these
church occasions I want to plead that I was paid to do
so, and that sometimes I got return dates.

Noting this disposition to memorize verses, my father
said to me, "What you fill your head with in that fashion
now will stay with you for a long while. It is a good
plan to select the best."

I tried to keep his advice in view. The old McGuffey
School Readers, it seems to me, were well-chosen selec-
tions. They ranged from Shakespeare to Patrick Henry
and Webster, and included such sonorous stuff as
Macaulay's and such gentleness as Whittier's. In the
full editions of the poets I devoured Tom Moore, Scott,
Burns, Longfellow, Bryant, Tennyson, Keats, and others.
The inference might be that this crowded out the trash,
but it didn't. Nothing is so omnivorous as the mind of
a growing boy bitten with the theatre and romance.

Before we quit the subject of poetry I want to say to
those who admired "Ivanhoe" and "Marmion," and
other thrilling things by their author that Sir Walter
Scott once said nothing had so influenced him through-
out his life as four lines of verse in a poem called "Cum-
nor Hall," by William Julius Mickle, a Scot, who died
when Walter was seventeen years old.

"The dews of summer night did fall,

The moon (sweet regent of the sky)
Silver'd the walls of Cumnor Hall,
And many an oak that grew thereby/*

For Walter Scott those words never became mere
polished surfaces, but remained always alive and held
their strangely moving and beckoning power. "And
many an oak that grew thereby/' Change that line to

so busy that he cannot leave the store, is asked to remem-
ber the regretful words of that successful scientist,
Charles Darwin, who, looking back in his seventieth
year, said

If I had my life to live again I would have made a rule to read
some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for
perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been
kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness
and may possibly be injurious to the intellect and more probably
to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our na-
ture.

Some great editors have read those lines of Darwin,
and grown thoughtful about them.

In my wish to write for the theatre, my father thought
I would meet with fewer obstacles in the degree that I
knew the theatre itself behind the curtain. I saw no
betraying twinkle in his eye as he talked to me about
it, but he was a person of cultivated self-control. He
reminded me quite seriously how Shakespeare had been
an actor, and had begun to write his plays from that
standpoint. He told me of Moli^re and of others that I
have forgotten, but particularly of Boucicault, so that
He built up a fair determination in my mind to get all
the experience I could. In the absence of a professional
association he approved of the amateur work, always
cautomng me that it would have some features that
mould have to be unlearned.

Louis amateur theatricals soon took on a semi-

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 85

professional tone. Those were the days of the Jay Gould
ownership of railroads. The enginemen were already
organized in discontent; the trainmen were following
their example. The managements were anxious and con-
ciliatory. So whenever the conductors, looking for ways
and means, invited our club to play for their "benefits"
at Moberly, the headquarters of our division, the super-
intendent promptly passed our little company; some
other influence fixed us with the Pullman people. Great
occasions, those, with all expenses paid; a full house
secured by the tickets the trainmen sold weeks ahead;
the local volunteer band at the depot when we arrived;
the big posters on the opera-house walls; the selected
orchestra that had just doubled in brass; and in front
every shopkeeper, barber, saloonist, hotelkeeper, attor-
ney, and family doctor who wanted to hold his railroad
clientele, each with his lady. Add to that a brave repre-
sentation from the local fire department in uniforms;
two policemen and the waitresses from the hotel, all
crowded into that second-story uncushioned auditorium,
impatient for the curtain to ring up, and you have a com-
bination equalled only when the state standards mass
round a national nomination to make it unanimous.

The freight agent at St. Louis, Captain P. Flanigan,
who had to deplete his force of some twenty clerks for
the day by excusing Matt Cooper, Fred Naylor, and me
for each of these rural assaults, was an able transporta-
tion man who had learned his business on the Mississippi.
He was of quite the better class of river captain, con-
siderably travelled and by no means unread.

Matt Cooper had a tracing department shut off from
the main office. The captain unfailingly visited him the
day after such a trip and heard every detail of it. I found

rt*i.

86 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Cooper in a gale of laughter after one such visit. He
closed the door to impart the joke to me in confidence.
The cue had been Cooper's narrative of the play of which
I was the author.

The proud captain had taken it seriously and his side-
splitting line — from Cooper's view-point, not from mine
— was "Why, if Gus can write that he may some day
be as big a dramatist as Boucicault." Cooper had con-
trolled his mirth till the captain left the room, and now
he was pounding me on the back to force me to see it.

The first steady job I got in New York was twelve
years later, when A. M. Palmer at the Madison Square
Theatre engaged me to take the place of Mr. Dion Bouci-
cault, who wished to retire. I tell it now in no prideful
flush whatever, but mainly in a gentle retrospect of dear
old P. F., and partly for its associative value: in the be-
ginning, my first boyish writing, a frank forage on Bouci-
cault's Kip; in the middle field that ridicule that Cooper,
of course, passed out for me to our little company; and
the finish — Boucicault's desk.

It was during this period that I got my first long coat.
There is nothing now extant by which with one indica-
tion it can be pictured. It was not so long as a Prince
Albert, nor so closely joined below the waist; not so cut-
away as the English morning coat of recent years, but
something between the two. Fashion dictated that it
should be made of what then was known as basket-cloth,
a prominent weave looking like a diminutive checker-
board with squares of one-half-inch. The material was
black, and when made-up was bound with the broadest
possible braid. With its arrival the women of the house-
hold thought I was entitled to an evening at a theatre
in company with some nice girl. My preference was for

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 87

a piquant young person of about fourteen years of age

named Dickey B . It had been an unexpressed fear

of my mother's that I would so choose. Dickey was a
bit the neighborhood soubrette in her way. She had an
elder sister, neither so good-looking nor so lively, whose
name I think was Louise. I don't remember inviting
Louise to go with me. That was arranged through some
conferences between the families; all now confused in
my memory perhaps because I wasn't aware of them.
No ladies went into the parquet of those days; I bought
two seats for a dollar each to the old Olympic dress circle,
which was sufficiently lifted at centre to allow patrons
of the parquet to pass through the gangway beneath it.
There was only one opposition theatre so the choice was
not wide, and the other attraction was a burlesque of
some kind to which a very young man with his girl
couldn't go. I can remember no occasion on which my
embarrassment was so great as when I sat in that thin
audience, the only man in the front row of a dinky dress
circle, and saw a performance of the serious history of
"King John." The poor girl and I tried to make con-
versation. I think she was depressed by the fact that
she had been wished onto me. I was depressed by the
same belief, and the much more overshadowing tragedy
of my basket-cloth coat which looked well in front of
the tailor's mirror but came up unpleasantly behind the
collar when I sat down; and persons looked at us in the
street-cars on the trips both ways. It was many years
before I was able properly to assess the memory of that
evening. It gradually turned from bitterness to indiffer-
ence and then to a comic recital, and as time went on to
a veritable treasure, as I found I was one of the very
few Americans who had seen a performance of "King

88 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

John," by Junius Brutus Booth, the elder brother of
Edwin, with his new wife Agnes Booth playing Constance,
and that sterling young actor of those days, Joseph
Wheelock, playing Faulconridge. I never met Junius
Brutus Booth, but his son, Sydney, and I are friends.
Mrs. Agnes Booth and I worked in more than one play,
and on her last appearance in Boston, in 1892, in a one-
act sketch called "After Thoughts" which I had written
for her and Ed Bell of the Madison Square Theatre, I
was her leading man. Joseph Wheelock I came to know
very well and rehearsed both him and later his son,
Joseph Wheelock, Jr., now both dead.

Those were thk transition days in the professional
theatre. The local stock company engaged to support
the visiting stars was gradually making place for the
visits of entire organizations. A local company might
work three or four weeks with as many different stars,
and then be laid off a week while Shook and Palmer or
Augustin Daly came in with a full cast for some success-
ful play from New York; or Tony Pastor brought a full
variety company. Some stars came with one or two
supporting actors for the second roles and filled the re-
maining parts from the resident stock. The uncertainty
of such a broken season quickly weakened the local com-
panies in both ability and number, so that at times in
St. Louis the house manager had to wire a hurry call to
Chicago or Cincinnati or in an extremity use even some
available amateur.

My first professional calls were of that origin, and
were soul-stirring occasions. I have in later years, as
have other authors— for themselves — gone on in some
New York emergency in some play of my own to replace
Maurice Barrymore or other actor of note in a stellar

ARTS AND THE THEATRE

r6Ie with less feeling of importance than I had in those
salad days as Mr. Fawnsgaines or C. F. Loon — cream-
faced loon — on the handbill, carrying a spear or serving
a letter on a salver. After a year or so this furtive asso-
ciation with the business put a fellow on the free list; I
began to desert the gallery and to nod familiarly to the
front doorkeeper as I went into the playhouse, leaving
him. to convince the visiting manager that I was entitled
to the privilege.

As I look back to the wonderful characterizations of
those days by the great men and women, Booth, McCuI-
lough, Barrett, Fechter, Davenport, Edwin Adams, Ben
De Bar, Barry Sullivan, the elder Sothern, Salvini, Kean,
Adelaide Neilson, Charlotte Thompson, Mrs. D. P.
Bowers, Janauschek, and a host of others in the legiti-
mate and romantic plays, I find that I remember vividly
the stage position of each of them at all times throughout
any performance. Not only was the reading of every line
impressive; the composition of the picture and the ways
of its acquirement were equally so. After the last days
of the resident stock, John W. Norton, a fine actor-mana-
ger, excellent as Othello, /ago, and Master Walter in the
"Hunchback," and to my mind the equal of any I ever
saw in Don Cesar de Bazan, St. Pierre, and the cloak-
and-sword heroes, continued a kind of paper organiza-
tion capable of quick mobilization for any chancy week
that threatened to leave a theatre dark in Louisville or
other near-by city. Of that Norton company I became
the juvenile lead, playing the seconds to Norton's first
parts; and although the hurried calls were few, one or
two only in a season, the hope for them colored and
buoyed every day, and filled many night hours with soli-
tary recitations of the possible roles.

90 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

The sure-fire comic character of the stage in those
days was German. His delineators were called Dutch
comedians. Their prince was the gifted, magnetic,
adored, and regretted Jo Emmett. The vaudeville — or,
as we said then, variety — representative was Gus Wil-
liams; later ones were Frank Bush and my next door
neighbor, Clark Fogel, known on the bills as Bert Clark.
Each of them struck twelve in a kind of "Lieber Augus-
tine" song, broken and emphasized by a rough dance in
wooden shoes. The German revolution of 1 848 had filled
America with a lovable immigrant of the Carl Schurz
frame of mind and longing for liberty, made still more
popular by their stalwart service as soldiers in the Union
cause.

This type gave way in the theatre to the stage Irish-
man, irresistible in Handy Andy blunder and volatile
humor. The greatest Irish comedian that I ever saw,
not excepting Mr. Boucicault, was Hugh Fay, of the old
firm of Barry and Fay. Mr. Fay was a tall, intellectual-
looking person with deep-set eyes and very scholarly
gentleness and repression. Perhaps these effects were
heightened by the contrast to his partner, Barry, who
was a short, roly-poly, rather rough-and-tumble per-
sonality. They made a great contrast in their several
vehicles, especially "Muldoon's Picnic," which had been
gradually elaborated from a vaudeville sketch to a three-
act comedy. This play is coupled in my mind with
"Florence's Mighty Dollar" for ability to rock its audi-
ence with laughter until persons here and there left the
auditorium for momentary escape from the side-ache of
it. The Irish impersonator was applauded and undis-
turbed until he forfeited support by his exaggerations;
until Irish-Americans revolted at the extravagance of

JOHN' \V. NORTON.

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 91

green whiskers and egg-sized lumps raised on bald heads
by cave-man shillalahs; after which the Irishman in
turn gave way to the stage Jew.

The most popular Jewish character actor of those days
was M. B. Curtis, who sprang into sudden popularity
in a drummer-salesman character called Samuel of Posen.
This play had the same progressive history of commer-
cial struggle that one gets glimpses of in "The Auc-
tioneer" and "Potash and Perlmutter," which play and
dramatization were both made by that talented Jewish
author, the late Charles Klein, and in which respectively
appeared David Warfield, Barney Bernard, and Alex-
ander Carr. The rise of Curtis financially was a phe-
nomenon of that time. The play had been done in the
East, and when it came to St. Louis its arrival was her-
alded by lithographs which showed Curtis as Samuel of
Posen mounted on a racing horse taking hurdles over
the field. These hurdles grew in the number of bars as
the horse progressed. Each hurdle had on it the name
of the city, with the bars carrying the advertisement of
the gross receipts of the play. We had often had in plays
the Jewish character, both sinister and comic, but aside
from the classical Jews, as Shylock and the Jew of Malta,
I do not recall the Jew as being a dominating character
of a play before that. Following Samuel of Posen, there
was an invasion of Jewish impersonations. This char-
acter bids fair to continue his comic tenure, because his
present exponent, engaged by a Jewish manager, is him-
self Jewish, and has his material furnished by observant
male and female writers of his race.

To go back just a little farther in the period we are
considering: The first time I ever sat in a dress circle
without my father was when my boy pal, Charley

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Beamer, bought the tickets. The attraction was Lydia
Thompson's "British Blondes." We were in^ the front
row of that horseshoe as one would be to-day if on a de-
pressed balcony. The burning, the unforgetable feature
of that Christmas matinee was the appearance of six
girls in tights. To-day I should know it was a bum-
front scene with two baby spots arranged to let the Car-
penters set the stage behind. Then it was an intoxicat-
ing illusion with calcium lights that never were on land
or sea. Three of those robust ladies I have forgotten,
but Lydia Thompson, Pauline Markham, and Eliza
Weathersby I remember.

In the matter of stage effect that sextet of substantial
femininity in a double cross current of prismatic splen-
dor is my lost chord. Now and then at Easthampton,
with the motor headlight making a profiled tunnel
through a lane of pines at 2A.M., there has been a heart-
throb of a former incarnation that I have been able to
connote as that Christmas matinee, but it was ephemeral,
tantalizing, fugitive, and mocking. The perfect ecstasy
of that holiday disclosure will never come again. Lydia
Thompson was playing Robinson Crusoe in a ballet skirt
and shako of snow-white goatskin, the rest of her cos-
tume, skin-white tights of silk.

The man Friday was the wonderful Harry Becket,
whose picture as one of its first officers now hangs in the
Lambs Club, New York. Friday was in brown. He
carried a large flappy valise and a dictionary, which, at
every moment of linguistic doubt, he threw himself on
his stomach and consulted violently. Each coveted
stage prop was picked up, and with a repeated "put it
m de bag" dropped into that insatiable receptacle.
The chmax came with the arrival of the rescue ship, a

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 93

stately frigate quite satisfying in stage perspective as it
rode into view on the third set water cut in profile. Cru-
soe was lyrically happy at the arrived relief; Friday stud-
ied the distant, full-rigged boat a moment and then,
striding by easy hurdles over the interposing waves,
said "Put it in de bag," and did so. Is there such whole-
some stage fun anywhere?

It will be impressive and perhaps valuable to set the
stage of that earlier amateur and professional environ-
ment. Let us rapid-living, swiftly going, flying people
of to-day try to realize that then there was not in all the
world a telephone or electric light or trolley-car or auto-
mobile; not even a bicycle had yet been evolved or in-
vented. There had been the velocipede, a tandem two-
wheel device with a saddle on which one wearing side-
whiskers could sit in a high silk hat and other singular
garments and propel himself by pushing along the ground
with his feet and then lifting them for a glide of a rod or
two; but nothing speedier or more automatic. There
were no typewriters. The newest illumination was coal-
gas; the quickest local communication was a longhand
letter sent by a boy. All watches wound with a key;
the stem-winder was not yet offered or introduced in
our section. But goldsmiths were not idle; each proper
shop tempted the ultra-fashionable by a tray of gold
toothpicks.

These fascinating implements, in a variety of decora-
tions, some even jewelled, were composed of a thin cylin-
der of precious metal three-quarters the length of a mod-
ern cigarette and half the diameter, from which by
turning the base of the tube one could cause to emerge
a piston fitted with a thin spearhead of gold, designed
to dislodge stubborn remnants of food from dental inter-

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

vals. After such an interesting service the harpoon, on
its disappearing gun carriage, moved into the cylinder
again and the implement was replaced in the right-hand
vest pocket. And for that meal^ as they say in diplo-
macy, the incident was closed.

Occasionally a young man in some older and more
established family inherited one of these toilet acces-

sories.

At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876
the Bell telephone was regarded as a toy. Visitors per-
mitted to listen to the voice of a friend speaking from
the next room examined the legs of the table to find the
tube which they were sure Mr. Bell had concealed to
convey the sound. The first arc light in St. Louis was
a few years later. This was a spitting and sparking
and blinding globe suspended outside of a Budweiser
beer bottler's on Sixth Street near Locust, and pedes-
trians were astonished at the magic silhouettes of them-
selves that it cast on the pavement. Street-car parties
were organized like the rubberneck auto deputations of
to-day to ride down-town and view this wonder. In-
candescent lamps came later still.

All that was but five and forty years ago. Statesmen,
ministers of the gospel, bankers, and boys all wore boots,
the leather legs of which reached halfway to the knees,
either under or outside the trousers. Lincoln, Johnson,
Grant, Hayes, and Oom Paul were inaugurated in such
gun-cases. Before sending trousers home, the tailor or
merchant of the ready-made faithfully obligated himself
to press out the creases down the front now regarded as
so desirable by the well-dressed. The well-to-do river-
men, the romantic survivals from the Jack Hamlin
period of Bret Harte, had soft-bosom shirts with wide

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 95

plaits fastened by gold or jewelled buttons held in a set
by a threadlike chain of gold, festooning from stud to
stud outside the shirt-bosom. The average man, how-
ever, had his shirt buttoning down the back to permit
an unbroken expanse of impenetrable front, garnished
by one large diamond mounted on a substantial crown
of gold, and anchored to this linoleum breastplate by a
tight-wormed spiral of the same metal. Tom Nast's old
cartoons of Bill Tweed show that Tammany chieftain
wearing one of these sparklers. Hotel clerks and negro
minstrels competed and specialized in this single shirt-
stud adornment. That the fashion had some intellectual
approval is indicated by a comment of Colonel Robert
IngersoII when in 1880 our city went Republican while
the State had gone Democratic.

He said, "St. Louis is a diamond stud on a dirty shirt."
Let me make now one inclusive declaration of inde-
pendence in belief. I wish to write through these
memoirs now and then of spiritism, clairvoyance, telep-
athy, and other psychic phenomena; and in order to
forestall any apprehension on the part of those at all
gun-shy on these subjects, to say that I am not a spiritist,
although possessed of a very avid curiosity on all that
authoritatively relates to spiritism. I am not a hypno-
tist, but am intensely interested in the phenomena of
hypnotism. I have no second sight, no clairvoyance, no
abnormal or supernormal powers of any nature; and yet
I think that perhaps more than the average man I have
been in contact with soi-disant possessors of such powers.
My father was one of the sanest and best-balanced
men I ever saw. He had had many chances to observe
the table tippings, rappings, levitations, and the like of
spiritists. He was reluctant to characterize all of it as

96 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

fraud and equally unwilling to accept it as any demon-
stration from the so-called dead. The most experienced
investigator of this class of phenomena that I personally
know, outside of those actively interested in the work for
psychical-research societies, is my present friend, Ham-
lin Garland. Mr. Garland conducted a series of investi-
gations some years ago for Everybody's Magazine, and
wrote one book upon the subject, masquerading as a
novel, under the title of "The Tyranny of the Dark."
Garland has seen and experimented with the so-called
materializations of spiritism. If I remember rightly, he
thinks the power may be but an undeveloped psychical
attribute of the race; that the so-called materializations
are psychically induced emanations from the operator's
own body, and that it is all a part of what we might call
unexplored biology.

Between the years of my father's cautious . dictum
and the equally conservative conclusions of Mr. Garland
I have read publications of the psychical-research socie-
ties of both England and America, talked extensively
with the late Doctor Hyslop, and had been asked by him
to write of some personal observations. That I never
did so was due to a congenital disposition to procrasti-
nate. My mother shared my father's agnostic attitude,
although surrounded by an atmosphere of the belief.
My dear old grandmother, of whom I have written some-
what playfully but with great reverence, had no doubts
on the subject. As a young woman she had been rebuked
for her opinions by her friend, Archbishop Purcell, who
took the safe and wholesome attitude of the Catholic
Church that the whole subject was an excellent thing
for the simple layman to avoid. Personally, grandmother
overrode this advice; she firmly believed that she was

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 97

in communication with a spirit world. This was not an
obtrusive or offensive or disquieting position with her,
because she seldom talked of it. But there were occa-
sions at home, some half-dozen notable instances, when,
with sickness somewhere in the brood of children and
the puzzled doctors in conference disagreeing, the old
lady had not hesitated to give a definitive diagnosis of
the trouble and prescribe a remedy. This she did with
all the solemnity of a traditional oracle, quietly seated
in her chair, but with none of the described theatricality
of the cult except that she closed her eyes.

On those remembered occasions there are no data for
verifying her diagnoses; but her recommended remedies
were completely curative, and although these were re-
sorted to as a rule without my father's consent, and some-
times against his opposition, their unbroken record of
successes gradually won his silence and apparently his
respect. This therapeutic assumption of grandmother's
was her only spiritistic claim. She had no visions or pre-
tended auditions; she told no fortunes; she attended no
church or circle of spiritists; nor had she with their pro-
fessed believers any relations whatever of which I ever
knew. Years after the last of A. W.'s letters she an-
nounced one day that he was dead. To use her own
words, she "just received a feeling of it." We had then
no acceptable way to verify her conviction. On my last
visit to St. Louis during her life, when in her eighty-
fourth year, she was but a shadow of the substantial and
militant grandmother of the Civil War period, she held
my hands as I bade her good-by for my return trip to
New York, and she talked of her approaching departure
to another world with the serenity of Socrates.

I know how one's prudent friends advise against any

lerson to a dinner in vvasnmgiou .
ing to John G. Carlisle, then Speaker of the House, and
Chief Justice Fuller of the Supreme Court, and knowing
as he did Jefferson's predilection for all things spiritistic,
he had felt it wise to caution Joe against showing that
side of his credulity in the company that evening. He
had explained that Carlisle was a hard-headed lawyer,
trained in the presentation of evidence and not given to
any vagaries unsupported by material testimony; and
Chief Justice Fuller, of the Supreme Court of the United
States, was eminently of the type of mind that his posi-
tion required, and that any spiritistic statements would
probably be prejudicial.

The dinner had hardly started; the rain outside in-
duced a serious atmosphere. Something was said that
made an easy approach to the subject, when Carlisle
himself introduced the question of spiritism, supporting
it by a most extravagant story of his own experience.
When Carlisle finished, Chief Justice Fuller followed
with something from his recollections that topped the
Carlisle story.

Colonel Watterson relates, " I then threw up my hands
and said, 'Joe, the bars are down.' "

On the day that I was dictating my recollections of
this story, in September, 1921, I had a telephone com-
munication from a mutual friend telling me that Colonel
Watterson was confined to his room with a slight attack
of bronchitis in the Prince George Hotel in New York.
I went to see him. Our friendship has existed since 1888.
I am happy to say that I found Colonel Watterson's

ARTS AND THE THEATRE

confinement to his room more cautionary than impera-
tive. In our rambling talk I reverted to this story of
Jefferson, and Colonel Watterson verified my recollec-
tions of it.

I told him that I was writing it in a contribution to a
paper, and said, "Why wasn't that in your own fine
book?"

He said: "There was so much to tell that most of that
kind of stuff was crowded out; and besides, my dignity
sat on my pen."

Perhaps by this implication, stimulating or restrain-
ing, according to one's interpretation, dignity should
drag a little here. But I feel the need, which Colonel
Watterson did not have, of laying a foundation for some
fuller expressions on the subject later on, all of them
relating to experiences that culminated as far as I be-
lieved the theatre then permitted an intelligent sum-
mary in my play "The Witching Hour." Besides, a
very wise counsellor once said: "We should be generous
even of our dignity." And so, with what I hope was a
cautious approach to the subject, and this explanation
serving as a rear-guard, I leave my psychical preparations
temporarily between them.

My interest and practice in drawing were advanced
by some experience nearly every day. Almost mechani-
cally I filled the margins of car reports and chance news-
papers with pencil sketches. During some winter nights,
as late as two or three in the morning, huddled in the
switch shanty in the railroad yard, waiting for the
double-decked hog trains that were arriving at half-
hour intervals, we used to get fun out of chalk or char-
coal caricatures of some member of the crew, drawn on
the walls of the dismantled box-car that served as our

4 ,

ioo THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

refuge. Now and then a switchman of undeveloped
taste would intrust to me a photograph to be enlarged
in crayon.

It may be because we young men were so much in the
midst of it that I got the idea that there was a consider-
able art interest in St. Louis at that period. Pictures of
three painters whose reputations led and which in later
years I had a chance to see again bear out the estimate
in which they then were held. James M. Tracy, a
painter of landscapes and animals, came afterward to
New York, and made a considerable stir with his pic-
tures of hunting dogs in the field. There was a time when
the important magazines were glad to reproduce these
canvases. J. R. Meeker, a man of heroic mould physi-
cally, had made a study of Southern landscape with its
hazy atmosphere, hanging moss, and brooding cranes..
Few men before or since have been so able to get the
spirit of the hazy regions of Pontchartrain. W. S. Mar-
pie handled landscape bits with the affection and delicacy
if not the superlative skill that mark the gentlewomen
that our present Thomas Dewing paints. About these
three men were a score of lesser popularity, with here
and there in the number men of equal craftsmanship.
Carl Gutherz was a Munich graduate, as was also Paul
Harney.

At the Washington University there was a completely
equipped and well-organized art school, founded by that
administrator of international fame, Professor Halsey C.
Ives, who later directed the art exhibit of the World's
Fair in Chicago. In one of the university departments
was the usual life class, and for the benefit of young men
who were obliged to work in the day some of the sessions
were held at night, In North St. Louis a little nucleus

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 101

met in the rooms of the brothers, George and Edward
Snell. A third companion there was the late Sylvester
Rawling, who subsequently became an important mem-
ber of the editorial staff of the New York World and an
authority upon music.

Four or five of us used to come together once or twice
a week immediately after supper at George Snell's rooms,
and start for our walk of two miles to the Washington
University for the night class, and when that was over
foot it home. We came back through the streets of sleep-
ing and shuttered houses toward midnight, laughing and
singing, as we knew from the stories of our elders the
students laughed and sang in the Latin Quarter.

Gutherz, one of the teachers in the life class, was a
master draftsman. Howard Kretchmar, the sculptor,
lectured on the skeleton and the muscular structures,
and made them vastly interesting. I recall the astonish-
ment with which I learned that a piece of sculpture in
the making was built up and not chiselled out of some
solid mass. This fact, so familiar to us older ones, now
conies as a helpful surprise to most beginners in art. I
recently saw a friend's wife who has considerable talent
for modelling struggling to obtain a form by cutting clay
from a sufficiently inclusive mass. She is a lady of thirty-
two and fair general information, yet she came with as-
tonishment to know that the sculptor in making a draped
figure sets up first the frame that somewhat simulates
the skeleton, and adds a sufficient outline to approximate
a nude before he puts over the final drapery.

About that time, encouraged by the three old artists
first mentioned, we organized a sketch club in St. Louis
with some thirty active members. Ihave been in many
organizations since then, from labor-unions to academies;

102 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

but none for sheer good fun, for emulation, for real
progress, for general education, and for generosity has
equalled that old St. Louis Sketch Club. We met twice
a month, each member bringing in a sketch upon a sub-
ject announced at the preceding meeting. The host of
the night obligated himself to furnish some sandwiches
and a keg of beer, and became the owner of the sketches.

The principal art firm of the city gave us a rear gal-
lery in which to have our fortnightly gathering, where
the sketches were tacked up on the wall or placed upon
proper pedestals, seriously discussed by all, constructively
criticised by the men competent to judge them, and al-
ways applauded when at all deserving. When we had
talked ourselves out about the exhibition, sandwiches
were opened up, the beer keg was tapped. Kretchmar,
Meeker, or some other positive personality presided,
with the beer mallet as a gavel, and there was such im-
promptu entertainment as the vivacious spirits of our
little artistic membership could give. The next day our
commercial house had the place cleaned up; the art men
on the local newspapers came in and wrote helpfully of
the exhibition and for a week following it was open to
the public.

The entertaining character of our meetings gradually
drew privileged citizens, and after a while it was our
custom to have as special guests, who came in after the
play was over, visiting actors of distinction. I made at
such meetings my first acquaintance with Robson, Crane,
Raymond, Wyndham, Florence, and other men. On her
first visit to St. Louis, when she brought with her own
art works, her little canvases and bronzes, the reception
to Sarah Bernhardt was under our auspices, and her
works were exhibited in connection with our own. We

ARTS AND THE THEATRE 103

had a special meeting in the aftcrnnon for the divine
Sarah. She stood in the salon of our little club to receive
three or four hundred honored with invitations. I re-
number her little flat but jaunty and bcplumed hat of
that period, set high on her shapely head, and her tight-
fitting gown of purple velvet, more like a riding-habit
than any other style that would in a word describe it.

Local interest in this little organization grew. Philan-
thropic and discriminating men picked from our mem-
bership the boys they thought capable of a career.
George Snell went as the protege of a syndicate to Paris.
A year or two later RuckstuII followed. About the same
time Will 1L Howe, the eminent cattle-painter, who now
lives at Bnmxville, where he may show his three medals
that make him bors concours in the National Salon of
1'Yanee, and who wears in his lapel the red ribbon of the
Lr>;itm of Honor, was another.

George Snell and Rawlings both are gone; a younger
brother, Henry Bay ley Snell, with medals from Phila-
delphia and Paris, the Buffalo and St. Louis expositions,
and from Panama, is now president of the New York
Water Color Club. One distinguished patron of art
and an honorary member of this sketch club was Mr.
John P. Colby, father of Bainbridge Colby, Secretary of
State during the last year of the Wilson Administration.
When our little gang in St. Louis said good-by to George
Snell the night before he started for Paris, with a real
sense of loss and more emotion in the Godspeed than
one finds anywhere outside of a college commencement
break-up, the parting ceremony was at John Colby's
beautiful home, with the future cabinet oificcr and his
younger sister tucked safely away in their beds.

These gentlemen who financed the Paris studies of

104 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

some of these boys made me a similar offer, but affairs
at home were not in a condition that permitted my leav-
ing. I had had some training for the disappointment
three years before, when, after a competitive examina-
tion, and by the help of the local Methodist minister,
who upon grandmother's appeal tutored and brushed me
up for the contest, I had won an appointment to West
Point. This had been declined for the same domestic
reasons. I write of both seeming deprivations to record
an unmanly self-pity, although I hope I didn't openly
confess it at the time.

There were no appointed Spartan preceptors in the
railroad yard to teach us to be calm above the aggression
of our hidden foxes, but there were stoical traditions. In
those days we used to injure in some degree or other an
average of a man a month, and it was the sporty thing,
with a foot that had just been mashed in a frog or a hand
that had been caught between the bumpers, to sit tight,
and while admitting it was tough luck to smile as gamely
as one could. A sturdy freight conductor, Alex Beecher,
with both legs run over and crushed at a siding some
fifty miles out, had rallied his demoralized crew, made
tourniquets of a couple of belts to stop the hemorrhage,
cut out all but his engine and caboose, telegraphed for
a clear track, sent a call to the St. Louis surgeons, and
when he pulled into the terminal to meet the ambulance
was sitting stoutly upright in his rude bunk calculating
his run. Heroic examples of that kind shamed the spirit
that could repine even to oneself over a disappointed
dream. But art and Paris could not have had for me
the varied experience that a catch-as-catch-can grapple
with the world enforced for the work I was ultimately so
glad to do.

VII

NEW FRIENDS AND YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS

I referred in the last chapter to the number of men
injured in the railroad yards before mechanical protec-
tions had been invented. The absence of safety devices
on the crude railroads of that day that made possible
these frequent physical accidents, the keenness of the
railroads to get the injured men to sign waivers of
damages or to take mere settlement of surgical and hos-
pital fees were among the many things of which the men
complained. They had just passed through a period of
payment by scrip; that is to say, paper promises by the
railroad instead of the paper currency of the United
States. This company scrip was discounted at the neigh-
borhood groceries, which further reduced the compensa-
tion of the men. Discontent was not local but nation-
wide.

Terence V. Powder ly, the labor leader, visited each
section of the industry and organized assemblies of the
Knights of Labor. I was not yet of age, but men in the
freight-yard closed their eyes to my disqualification. I
became a member of the Missouri Assembly No. 9 and
a subscriber to its oath. This assembly had about two
hundred members recruited from the trainmen and the
freight platforms.

Their attempts at conducting business in parliamen-
tary fashion were frequently confused, and after I had
been called upon a number of times because of my page-

105

asking this kid what to do when we know that if we put
him into the chair we can get through with our business
and get home to bed?"

There was no dissent even from the incumbent officer,
and with no outspoken opposition I was elected to the
place of master workman. As a man, according to the
laws of the organization, had to be twenty-one years of
age, and I was two years shy of that, it is probably a
fair assumption that I was the youngest master workman
in the order. I went through a protracted local strike
at that time with our men, and sat in councils that de-
cided rather fateful questions.

In any secret organization an oath with the accom-
panying ceremonies and surrounding paraphernalia is an
impressing thing. Although not a joiner, I have seen
two or three kinds of initiation; but never an equal so-
lemnity to that of those men, who felt they were uniting
in a life-or-death class struggle.

At that time it was not the avowed policy of organized
labor to keep clear of politics. I think the leaders among
them felt that to influence legislation was the way out
of their difficulties. At any rate, in my twentieth year
the Labor Party of St. Louis determined to make an
organized protest, and although moving to an unques-
tionable and thoroughly foreseen defeat in the elections,
they decided upon the count of noses. In that forlorn
hope, as an ineligible candidate for clerk of the circuit
court, I made my first out-of-door, cart-tail speeches.
The atmosphere was pretty thoroughly surcharged. The
great railroad strike had swept the country. In Pitts-

FRIENDSjWD YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS 107

burgh the strikers had been victorious over the local
militia. They had driven the Philadelphia Grays into
a roundhouse upon which they trained their captured
cannon, and into which they ran a car of burning oil.
The Grays were many of them trampled to death. Mil-
lions of dollars' worth of property was destroyed, and
order was restored only when General Phil Sheridan,
with United States troops, took charge of the situation.

John Seott, the first Earl of Eldon, Lord Chancellor
of England in 1821, is quoted as saying, when he was
eighty years of age, and protesting against the rapid
disposition of anybody in the possession of three acres
and a cow to become conservative, "If I were to begin
life again, I am damned but I would begin as agitator."
I hud not read Lord Eldon, but I began as agitator.

Through all this perilous time I had at my elbow my
clear ukl father, wise in political and military fashion;
and it may be that much of our organized activity was
tempered by thoughtful things I was able to say to my
men and of which father had in serious discussions in-
formed me,

\\V talk now of persisting forces that work at the foun-
dation of our civilization either for its upbuilding and
its support or its renovation or its decline; it is proper
to be briefly serious concerning them. Associated as I
was with men who were working with their hands and
were constantly risking their lives, I have no apology
for a sympathetic alignment with them in what was de-
cided class feeling. In my immature and impulsive
measurement of the field it seemed that money was heart-
lessly exploiting the people. My father didn't believe
that to be so desperately the case. Working as a printer
at that time, he joined an assembly of Knights of Labor

then I have had a boy of my own, and 1 know it was the
supervision of an affectionate parent who felt that he
must move somewhat cautiously to influence a rather
impulsive son.

Somewhere in his reading father had picked up ^the
statement that when Arkwright invented the spinning-
jenny there had been six thousand hand spinners in Eng-
land, and that fifty years after the machinery was in
fair operation the man-power of the machines represented
the work of six hundred million spinners. He had a state-
ment, probably gathered from the same source, or one
similar, that when the hand spinners were undisturbed
in their work the land of England had been under two
hundred and fifty thousand separate owners; that after
machinery had been in use fifty years the land of Eng-
land had been concentrated into the possession of thirty-
two thousand individual and corporate ownerships. I
wasn't able to make any profound deduction from these
two facts, but I remember my father saying to me:

" Suppose we both were hand spinners competing, and
that I suddenly came into the possession of a machine
that could do the work of two hundred and fifty men,
where would you be? Suppose I made money enough
to buy a second machine, and I had five hundred man-
power to oppose against the output of your two hands."

Somehow he felt that the dominance of the machine
was a factor in its present status that threatened civili-
zation. He wasn't sufficiently Chinese to wish to destroy
the machine, nor was he statesman enough or political
economist enough to know the proper answer; perhaps

FRIENDS AND YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS 109

there isn't anybody at Washington or Westminster that
can give it now; but he thought he saw a gleam of
promise in an income tax that could be wisely used. I
had a groping apprehension of what he was trying to
work out, and in my cart-tail speeches advocated an in-
come tax.

I talked it in every political campaign thereafter to
which I was admitted or tolerated. America could not
have played her part in the recent World War without
an income tax which enabled her to take excess profits.

To jump ahead chronologically, I remember meeting
Mr. Charles Schwab in the foyer of a theatre when at
his wife's solicitation he was taking a half-day off from
his strenuous work in the war.

With the utmost cheerfulness, he said to me, apropos
of the government assessments, "I have to make one
hundred dollars for every eleven I want to use for my-
self."

There was no color of complaint in this, but rather a
pride in the resourcefulness of his country. But leaving
the question of income tax aside, I wonder now if the
insensate machine, still encroaching where it has not yet
subdued, isn't largely responsible for part of the inter-
national industrial mess. I wonder if our trouble is alto-
gether a friction between capital and labor — a matter
only of production and markets; or if there is not more
obliquely and obscurely some trouble still in that old
menace that my father thought he sighted.

One clause at that time in the constitution of the
Knights of Labor provided that no lawyer should be a
member of the order. The constitution was an emana-
tion of Mr. Powderly's council, and I shall leave to him
or others equally wise the reason for this precaution.

i io THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

But by the automatic action of that clause, when I en-
tered the law office of John Colby to study law I had
my Washington's Farewell to that assembly.

John Peck Colby was born in Nunda, New York. He
was the son of Luke Colby, a Baptist clergyman, promi-
nent in educational movements of the day and identified
with several institutes of learning which had their origin
at that time.

Young John, enlisting in the Union Army in the Civil
War, attained the rank of captain. At the close of the
war he married an Elmira girl, Frances Bainbridge, re-
lated to Commodore Bainbridge, of Mediterranean fame,
and became instructor of Latin and Greek in the local
academy. After he was admitted to the bar he came
to St. Louis with his bride to establish a home.

My acquaintance with him had begun, as I have said
before, in the circle of artists and his first interest in me
had been along those lines. At that time his son, Bain-
bridge, was not quite ten years of age; his little daughter,
Lisle, was younger. Mrs. Frances Bainbridge Colby's
father also was a clergyman — the Reverend Doctor Bain-
bridge, then of Elmira.

As John used to say, "It was seldom that one saw such
eminent piety concentrated in one family."

In the law office I found the books unattractive, but
I read Blackstone's "Commentaries," "Parsons on Con-
tracts," and the other ponderous furniture of that sombre
place.

If, after my grandmother and my own parents, I
named the most definite personal influence I had known,
I should say it was probably that of Mr. John Colby.
With the habit of his scholarly precision, he was very
much more interested in the style of anything I had to

FRIENDS AND YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS in

compose in or out of business hours than he was in its
legal accuracy. In both art and letters he was a patient
advocate of standards, and he had a sensibility natural
and cultivated that made him aware of any influence
having a tendency to depress them. He had a love of
simple Anglo-Saxon and a sense of fitness in its use or
propriety in its elaboration. His reading was wide and
selectively renewed, and he had that capacity for quick
association or analogy that the psychologists note as a
prime element of genius. In writing of his influence upon
me I feel that I may claim as an effect of it only an "at-
tention" on my part, and not a "forward march."

His son, Bainbridge, was a sturdy boy with a well-
balanced interest in books and play, and in the first days
of our association intensely interested in my railroad
activities and his occasional chance thereby to get among
the cars and locomotives. A characteristic quality of
the boy was his interest in affairs and his capacity for
sustained attention. The shipping cards on the side
doors of the cars indicating destinations and contents
interested him. He had to know the reasons for these
supplies going to certain places; the original shipping
points of their production; the interrelation of the sec-
tions of the country; and he took such information as I
was able to give and made such pat application of it and
such thoughtful associations of its parts that it was a
source of constant astonishment to me. His father, who
was a wise educator, had in the library of their home a
large-sized terrestrial globe, so that the children had no
distorted ideas of the relative extents of the different
countries such as most of us get in school from the inade-
quate systems of maps. Another characteristic of the
boy was in the kind of questions he used to put to his

ii2 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

father. I remember Colby, Sr., showing a. good-natured
generalization of these attacks by replying to the first
of an expected bunch of volleyed questions by a prompt
resort to the established stencil.

He said, "The gentleman of whom you ask is in the
woodcnwarc and cooperage business; he makes barrels
and buckets; he sends them to all sections of the coun-
try; he is at the head of a very reputable firm; I think
they do a large business," And the father finished with
a hearty laugh at the boy's reception of this short circuit
on his intent.

All that delicate culture could give to him Bninbridge
was getting from that household and its atmosphere;
personally I was anxious to make him familiar with the
rougher edges of life. My attempts at this often ran
counter to the family's ideas. The Fourth of July was
not then safe or sane, but their careful mother kept ex-
plosives from the Colby children. There can never be
any world conflagration in which Bambridge Colby,
however active politically, will create .such a sensation
as he did on our first Fourth together when we came
back from the corner grocery, young Bambridge astride
of my shoulders and holding in each hand, by the tail
of its plaited fuses, a package, of exploding firecrackers,
which of course very safely released themselves from
the string before they fell and went off at our feet.

At that time in Kansas City there were two girls to
whom George Snell and I used to write from St. Louis.
One Sunday wfc planned a visit to them, and by some
relaxation of the rules I had persuaded the Colby parents
to let us take Bainbridge along. lie was then a kid of
ten, and roughed it quite manfully with us overnight in
the chair car. The nearest station to our destination in

FRIENDS AND YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS 113

Kansas City was a stop that as we neared it we learned
had, for our train, been cut out; but we felt that we
would not go by at a speed that would prevent our
getting off. Snell took his place on the steps of the car
in front of us ; we — Bainbridge and I — were on the plat-
form immediately after. Following instructions, he had
his arms wrapped around my neck and his legs around
my waist — I had a waist in those days. I dropped on to
the platform, all right with the boy in the greatest glee;
but the speed was too fast for Snell, who prudently stuck
to the train as he blew us a kiss and went a mile farther
on. My excuse for this foolhardy act is that I was as
ignorant as Caesar's boatman of the freight I carried.
Bainbridge's recital of this experience didn't make the
hit at home we had looked for.

My father had taught me boxing while he sat on a
chair. I began in like manner to teach young Bainbridge
the art. This was as contrary to the church precepts
ruling that house as can be imagined; but at irregular
intervals we persisted. When Bainbridge at sixteen left
for his freshman year at college he had pretty well out-
grown his tutor. I don't remember whether reports
were satisfactory as to studies, but on the freshman field-
day my pupil with soft gloves knocked out two men.
I have seen him since in legal and political contests, and
have had no difficulty in persuading myself that the
stamina there invariably shown had in it some element
of our earlier work together. In 1916, when Mr. Roose-
velt tried to lead the Progressive Party back into the
Republican fold, it was the fighter Colby who resisted
that unattractive persuasion; and in the ensuing cam-
paign, when Colby, as the principal unterrified Progres-
sive, canvassed the West for Wilson, I think the three

ii4 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

deciding votes from California were more a response to
the pugilistic antecedents of the oratory than to any
theological recollection. Also in the smoothly lucid and
unmistakable diction of his diplomatic communications
I thought there was the firmness of the lad who knew
how to keep his balance and to put up his hands.

Colby, Sr., was very sympathetic with my scattering
interests, and especially with my play-writing ambitions.
Before I went into his office, and as a sequence to my
experience in our North St. Louis dramatic club, I joined
the larger McCuIIough Club. This organization of ama-
teurs, while resembling the present Comedy Club of
New York and the Mask and Wig of Philadelphia, had
certain distinctive features that are worth considering.
The old McCuIIough Club had about five hundred mem-
bers, of which fifty or more were on the active list. Each
member paid ten dollars a winter, and for that received
two admissions to each of the five performances in a
season. The plays for these were carefully chosen, and
were as thoroughly rehearsed as amateurs can rehearse,
taking two or three nights a week for a month. A regular
theatre was rented for the single performance. The
mechanical force back of the curtain was of professional
hands from the regular houses.

Shortly after joining the club, because of my semi-
professional and considerable amateur experience, too, I
became the stage-manager of the organization. Any one
who has sympathized with my allusions to financial em-
barrassment hitherto will feel a sense of relief at learning
that I received fifty dollars a performance for rehearsing
and presenting each play. As this work was done out-
side the hours of other employment, it was what was
then and may still be called velvet.

FRIENDS AND YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS 115

A number of actors who achieved fair prominence,
though not stellar distinction, were graduated from that
club. William Beaumont Smith, son of General A. J.
Smith, of Vicksburg and Red River famej was one of our
members. He later went on the professional stage and
was for many years a popular leading man. Guy Linds-
ley, who has been Mr. Robert MantelPs leading man, was
another McCuIIough Club boy; Mr. Edgar Smith, for
many years librettist for Weber and Fields, and now
still successful as dramatic author, was another; the late
W. G. Smythe, who was the first manager for William
Collier, and thereafter for many years, up to the date
of his death in September, 1921, the booking manager
for the Belasco attractions, was a McCuIIough Club actor;
A. G. Robyn, the composer, had his first musical work
presented by members of this company.

In those days there was an old play called "Mrs. Wal-
dron's Bachelors," a fifteen-cent book available to any
amateur and without copyright. From it Mr. Joseph
Bradford had made the play called "Our Bachelors," in
which Robson and Crane were starring. There is an
anecdote of this author, Joseph Bradford, who was a
very able Boston journalist, that should not be lost.
There will be no better place for it than this.

Bradford, who wrote of and for the theatre, had a
wish to play, and when Adelaide Neilson came to that
city in repertoire the management arranged for Brad-
ford to go on in the small part of Paris in "Romeo and
Juliet." In the abridged version his only appearance
was as the bereaved bridegroom at the tomb of Juliet,
where he encounters Romeo forcing the door to the vault.
Romeo, interfered with, kills Paris, who falls and speaks
the line, "0, I am slain!"

Bradford was so occupied with the technic of being
stabbed and falling that he forgot his line. He not only
forgot to speak it, but he forgot what it was, until some
minutes later, when Romeo has taken the poison and is
dead, and Juliet, kneeling over his body, is bewailing
him.

At this point the interested audience was astonished
to see the corpse of Paris rise to its elbow and, as if re-
senting the sympathy that was being showered upon the
unhappy Juliet, exclaim, "O, I am slain!"

The house, which had utterly forgotten the unimpor-
tant man up stage, burst into a chorus of laughter which
brought down the curtain on the unhappy Adelaide.

When the McCuIIough Club announced "Mrs. Wal-
dron's Bachelors" the attorneys for the Robson and
Crane enterprise endeavored to enjoin the performance
legally, but the amateurs won out. Another attempted
injunction was when the club put on "Esmeralda," by
Mrs. Burnett and William Gillette. This they had re-
hearsed from the published text of the play in the Cen-
tury Magazine. Our present copyright law was not in
existence then. Legal action taken to protect a play was
based upon property right under the common law, but
the courts were reluctant to say that plays printed in
magazines had not been printed subject to any use that
any buyer might care to make of them. In both of these
unauthorized performances I had the leading part.

"Esmeralda" was played by the club only a few weeks
before the regular Madison Square Company came to
St. Louis with the drama. One of the local papers, the
Spectator, in criticising the professional company, said
that the performance of old man Rogers by Mr. John E.
Owens had not been so good as that of the same part by

ui me cuuj.it! y, ctiiu tins uicctmieui, ui mm was iiui tu DC
tolerated by the management. A controversy ensued
which lasted while the company was there, and was then
forgotten. I rather egotistically make a note of it be-
cause years later it was the basis of a pretty act of gen-
erosity on the part of Mr. Owens.

A moving spirit in the McCuIIough Club — in its or-
ganization, its management, and in its active expression
— was Wayman McCreery, now dead. I am sure that
ten thousand of his surviving contemporaries in the city
of St. Louis will remember Wayman McCreery. Few
men are so physically and intellectually equipped as he
was. There was nothing that an athlete could do with
his body that in a notable degree Wayman McCreery
could not do. He was boxer, wrestler, fencer, runner,
and swimmer, and all-round athlete. In addition to these
he was a graceful step dancer. Intellectually he was
equipped with a college training and had an interest in
everything that interested the intelligent people of his
day. He sang well enough to be a leading tenor in a
fashionable choir. He wrote music of good quality. He
was the author of the opera "L'Afrique," which was
first done by amateurs in St. Louis and subsequently
produced in New York, although with not very great
success, by Jesse Williams. McCreery will be remem-
bered by the sporting world as the inventor of the three-
cushion game of billiards, of which he was at one time
the national champion. As Hugh Chalcot in Robertson's
comedy "Ours" it would have taken a professional to
equal him. Another part of McCreery' s was Captain
Hawtree in "Caste," by the same author.

n8 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

The Colby children, like all youngsters, were attracted
by such knowledge of the world behind the curtain as
our home talk developed and as an occasional peep be-
hind scenes would emphasize. As is commonly the ease
also, the little girl's interest was the greater. One day
she brought to me a copy of St. Nicholas with Mrs. Bur-
nett's story of "Editha's Burglar."

"Don't you think," she asked, "that would make a
pretty play?"

With the addition of the dramatic element by having
the burglar be the child's father, it did make a pretty
play, the first of mine to be done professionally and to
be produced in New York.

Theatricals, amateur and scmiprofossional, gradually
claimed more and more attention, so that when I finally
told Mr. Colby that I thought the east in the law-books
was too short, that nothing could be done with John
Doe and Richard Roe, and that the love interest was
entirely lacking, he made no objection to my accepting
the offer of Mr. Charles R. Pope to go into the box-oflice
of his new theatre.

Charles R. Pope had been a partner with Mr. Charles
Spalding in the ownership of the old Olympic. The men
had separated for some reason, and Mr. Pope had built
Pope's Theatre on the site of the late Century Theatre
in St. Louis. Pope's Theatre was rather economically
constructed by making a playhouse out of a church that
stood there. Mr. Pope was without capital; he financed
his enterprise by the issuance of a number of subscribers'
tickets which admitted the holders to two performances
a week at a reduced rate. These tickets were not un-
like the old-time commutation tickets on a railroad, with
margins of serial numbers to be punched as the tickets

were used. Visiting companies objected to this bargain-
counter finance, and these tickets were the occasion of
endless trouble.

Before managing the Olympic with Spalding, Charles
Pope had been a tragedian of considerable prominence,
especially in the West. He was a man of heroic figure,
stentorian voice, and a method plainly founded on Edwin
Forrest's. At both the Olympic and Pope's Theatre he
continued to appear when the opportunity offered or the
emergency required. His wife was Margaret Macauley,
a member of the well-known Kentucky family of that
name. Her brother, Daniel Macauley, the senior of the
family, had been a general in the Union Army and won
distinction. A second brother, Barney Macauley, was
one of the foremost actors of his day. A still younger
brother was John, who ultimately became the sole owner
of Macauley's Theatre in Louisville, in which all the
brothers had been jointly interested.

Mr. Pope's financial troubles in St. Louis were not
confined to the commutation reductions which he was
occasionally required to make up, and the men in his
box-office had an intimate acquaintance with the amus-
ing financial finesse then customary in theatrical circles.
Then, as now, among bills paid by the resident manager
were those of the bill-poster. Our St. Louis bill-poster
was a rough, truculent, good-hearted person named Cot-
trcll, who might have stepped out of that group of pirates
in "Treasure Island" as far as his appearance was con-
cerned, and very often Pope wished he would go back.
Besides his bristling mustache and black beard, he had
a gin-and-fog voice that would have frightened any nur-
sery. It was the duty of us men at the window, when
we saw CottrcII coming to collect his bills, to flag the

120 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

owner, who would then flatten himself against the inner
wall and stay out of sight.

On one occasion, however, Cottrell was too quick for
the manoeuvre, and caught Mr. Pope on an early after-
noon when — as we knew — there was no money in the
bank, none in the box-office, and no prospect for the eve-
ning. Cottrell wanted his bill. Pope's histrionic train-
ing stood him in stead.

Pushing the treasurer aside, he leaned on the box-
office window-sill and said: "Where are those stands
and three sheets, Mr. Cottrell, for whose posting you
are demanding payment?"

Cottrell made the expected reply that they were on
the billboards throughout the city.

"Well," said Mr. Pope, "I want my paper to be put
on the walls where the people are and where the car lines

run."

This metrical diction into which Pope in his blank-
verse training always drifted in his moments of dignity
elicited from Cottrell the reply that the bills were there
in the places Pope had described.

"I want to see them."

"Well, how can you see them?"

"I can see them by your getting a horse and buggy
and driving me over the route."

Cottrell belligerently agreed to do this, and the trip
was made. When the two men came back it was past
banking hours. Pope proudly gave him a check that
could not be offered for payment until an evening had
intervened, in which he could scout among his friends
for cash.

As theatre manager, the old tragedian, not always in
the best of health, made a gallant fight, not only against

houses, who combined against him. He finally won out
and sold his theatre at a profit on his time and trouble.
When Harrison was elected to the presidency, Mr. Pope
became our United States consul at Toronto, where his
fine presence, his dignified bearing, his knowledge of
modern languages, and the bonhomie of the old trouper
made him as fine a national representative as we had
at any European court.

There was not always good business at Pope's Theatre.
As in other playhouses, we had idle times, when a man
in the box-office had little to do. In those days there
was not in St. Louis any rapid-fire photo-engraving es-
tablishment. Any pictures wanted quickly for a news-
paper could be turned out more promptly by the local
wood-engravers, of whom there were several. Many
otherwise idle hours in the box-office I was able to occupy
profitably on such occasional illustrations.

There are few occupations more fascinating than to
draw upon boxwood. This material,- which comes in
blocks type high and varying from the width of the news-
paper column to four or five, as desired, is made of little
sections, each not more than a square-inch in size,
dowelled together more tightly than marquetry in furni-
ture is joined. The surface of this assembled block is
pumiced to a delightful smoothness, having enough grain,
however, while imperceptible to the touch, to take a
pencil-point without slipping. As it comes to the drafts-
man, it has the natural-wood color not unlike the tint
of freshly planed pine. Over this one throws a light wash
of water-color white. The surface then is good for either
pencil or brush.

122 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

When one has finished his drawing by cither of these
methods, the wood-engraver cuts out all the portions of
the block that are meant to be white in the reproduction
— that is to say, meant not to print at all and leaves
the rest. If he left the rest unchanged, however, it would
print a solid black silhouette. The engraver's skill lies
in so breaking this surface as to get by the use of alter-
nating black and white lines the various shades the artist
intended. The simplest understanding of this will be by
considering an outline drawing only, but done in pencil,
which of course is gray and not black. If the engraver
left this line unbroken it would print, black, however,
and resemble a pen stroke and not the mark of a pencil.
But wishing to give the pencil effect, he traverses the line
on his block with a sufficient number of tiny cut-out
spaces to get resemblance to the. pencil mark.

As an example of a pencil drawing upon a piece of box-
wood so treated that the gray reproduction resembles
the pencil, there is given here an outline cut that, has a
story. At the time of which 1 am talking there was a
young man in New York named I;recldie Gebhard, who
came into sudden prominence through his admiration
for and attentions to a world-renowned actress then
visiting America. As I remember, Mr. (Jcblmrd's enthu-
siasm did not have the approval of his father, and nearly
all the newspapers felt distressed about it. Despite these
solicitudes Mr. Gebhard joined the lady in her various
professional engagements throughout the country. The
people called him a dude.

Few of us now remember what were the distinguish-
ing characteristics of a dude forty years ago, when the
name was adopted. The principal ones were that he
should wear very tight trousers, a black cutaway coat,

FRIENDS AND YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS 123

"the beetle tails of which protruded some six inches below
a. short tan-colored box-cloth overcoat of very easy di-
n-tensions. Besides these sartorial marks, a dude was
supposed to be somewhat of a sapling and lacking in
inanly fibre.

A morning paper in St. Louis had on its editorial staff
at that time a man named Cunningham, reputed to be
a person of physical courage and a dangerous man to
provoke. Some of the things that Mr. Cunningham
wrote about Mr. Gebhard's St. Louis visit displeased
that gentleman. Gebhard inquired concerning the writer,
learned his name and reputation, and then, before a con-
siderable group of spectators one evening just after din-
ner in the corridor of the Southern Hotel, walked up to
Mr. Cunningham and very soundly slapped his face.
Something in the way in which he did this convinced
the observers that it had been intentional and premedi-
tated, and had respectable force of character behind it.
Nothing was done about it except some extended reports
by the rival papers.

Mr. Gebhard stepped into a kind of public respect.
It was not possible to get pictures of him. He didn't
want notoriety. As the story above would indicate, he
rather resented it. A weekly paper in the city asked me
to get a drawing of him from memory. It wasn't a good
plan to ask him to pose. It was learned that Mr. Geb-
hard had for the week a certain seat three rows from the
orchestra rail which he occupied every night his friend
the actress played. This seat was on the right aisle of
the parquet near the trap drummer. By an arrange-
ment with that member of the orchestra I got a chair
in his corner from which I could see Mr. Gebhard, and
in that manner the pencil drawing was made. It is of-

124 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

fcrccl now as a point d'appiti for this story, and as an
example of a wood-engraver's line that looks like lead-
pencil.

A really fine wood-engraver is an artist of a very su-
perior typo, excelling in real technical knowledge his
brothers- of the brush or chisel; but he is becoming in-
creasingly rare, as the photographic and autographic
processes of illustration drive his work From the maga-
zines and papers. Fifty years ago, when Blanchard Jer-
rold, son of Douglas Jerrold, wrote his "London Pil-
grimage," in 1872, and Gustavo Dor6 illustrated it so
splendidly, there were three or four wood-engravers work-
ing upon the illustrations, whose production deserved and
gained as much if not more praise than the work of Dar&
himself.

The last of the great American wood-engravers is the
veteran Timothy Cole, now living at Poughkeepsie, New
York, and in his seventieth year .still working impor-
tantly at his profession. The superlative skill of Timothy
Cole won for him membership in the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, The best collected records we have
of the old masters of Italy, Holland, England, Spain,
and France are his wood-en^ravin^s. for which he has
had gold medals at the Paris, Chicago, and 8t< lanus
expositions. It would be impossible on the printing-
presses that run off our great weekly and daily editions,
going into the hundred thousands in one issue, to show
the finest example of a wood-engraver's art. Such pic-
tures, delicately printed on Japanese paper, and properly
mounted, enrich the collection of connoisseurs.

The most simplified process of reproduction available
to draftsmen of St. Louis Inrame common about this
time. It employed paper overlaid with starch in solu-

IM v

. 7 •• i *v

i| - ji I
J ) fa «

FRIENDS AND YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS 125

tion. The paper was toothed or pebbled to take the
mark of the greasy lithographic crayon. A drawing made
upon it was turned face downward upon a lithographic
stone and passed beneath a hot roller under considerable
pressure. The heat and pressure transferred the greasy
crayon to the lithographic stone, which was then used
as if the drawing had been made directly upon it, and
produced the ordinary lithograph with but a slight loss
of value from the drawing made upon the paper. This
process was used in the production of the cartoon of
which a reduction is shown.

There are two or three interesting facts connected
with this cartoon. To the best of my belief it was the
first political cartoon printed in St. Louis of Mr. Joseph
Pulitzer, the eminent publisher and organizer of the
present New York World. Pulitzer, in 1880, the date
of this cartoon, had not yet purchased the old New York
World, and had but recently acquired the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch, of which he was proprietor and editor.

He and others in St. Louis were joining in an attack
begun by Major Emery S. Foster, editor and proprietor
of the St. Louis World, against a political conspiracy
known as the Dark-Lantern Ring, engaged in the sale
of political nominations.

The directing mind of this conspiracy was said to be
a politician named Lancaster. He was assisted by an
aggressive little attorney named Frank Turner and a
blacksmith named Edward Butler, who was at the head
of the political machine. Lancaster, Turner, and Butler
are in the front row of the cartoon in the order named,
and Butler is pictured as knocking out of the ring State
Senator Cable, one of the beneficiaries of their combina-
tion, who had indiscreetly talked too much about it.

126 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Outside of the ring and looking in are depicted Colonel
William Hyde, then editor of the Missouri Republican ;
and Mr. Joseph Pulitzer, who with Colonel Hyde was
endeavoring to correct the corrupt conditions.

Major Emery S. Foster, who had won distinction in
the Northern Army, was a modest but very notable figure
in St. Louis. In the Civil War he had been captured by
QuantrelFs Guerillas and was said to be the only Union
prisoner released by this band, who made a practice of
giving no quarter.

His escape was due to one of those border romances
which the public are apt to think inventions of the
novelist and the playwright, and a fine example of which
was interwoven in Mr. William Gillette's war play, " Held
by the Enemy."

In the Quantrell group of James boys and Younger
brothers was one man who knew the captured Foster,
as he and Foster were rivals for the hand of the same
girl. With her in mind, this Quantrell guerilla had asked
for the life of Foster, and being granted this by Quantrell
had conducted Major Foster outside the lines and given
him his liberty. This particular Southerner still lives;
and the lady in question, now his wife, is also living.

Major Foster, at the close of the war, became the editor
of the St. Louis Journal A very personal editorial at-
tacking him appeared one morning in the St. Louis
Times, of which ex-Confederate Major John Edwards
was the editor. Foster immediately challenged Edwards,
and the two men met upon the Illinois side of the Missis-
sippi, some few miles above St. Louis. At the first shot
Edwards' bullet went wild; Foster's bullet went through
Edwards' hat, grazing his scalp.

While the seconds were reloading the pistols Foster

YOUTHFUL EXPLOITS 127

over

•Js vot ^^vards and put out his hand, saying,

•i'tk con T€tl:Lc^ I are a pair of damn fools."
n, HIIC I t-T Xicrteci Foster to a log near by, sat down
tin Wit-T-^ erL "t°^ Foster that he had nothing what-
; in hi*a T "** editorial; that he had gone home

j j * ec* "Wrien Stilson Hutchins, the proprietor,
• imhf* Trie. ^to the office and written the objec-
li « ^p^13*01^- Edwards, however, true to the

accepted the responsibility of his

.1 11'^ °^ r^aders will remember Major Foster

U!S .%%| X<T ^"^ "t^lat same St. Louis Journal first made

r.iu-ci the cKarges that led to the expose of what

"TI t*US ^G Whiskey Ring, in Grant's Adminis-

"a.t ^ wa.s not a band of bootleggers engaged as

',upp living a, -thirsty community, but was a com-

i n»u thriving the evasion of the internal revenue

n •-] » t r rts . I n the prosecution of that ring General

.l»p'»«nt;ccl SLS attorney ex-Senator John B. Hender-

.•vmusl^y referred to in connection with incidents

C"*** *
--1"ty. As the investigation in court pro-

am! involved General Orville E. Babcock, who
• Pi i*si dent's private secretary, Henderson, boast-
iilrirnee to where the investigation led, said that
n«>t anion.g tliose "to bend the pregnant hinges of
r tluit tKrift may follow fawning." Over his im-
•ftuiu't* Gra.nt had promptly removed Mr. Hender-
in Itis position, and General Babcock, on a de-
i fn mi I^jresident Grant, was acquitted.
»«• time I "was making these drawings for Major
tit th:it ca-no.p>aign he was a soldierly-looking figure
ailv fifties- He had a fine face, good brow, clear-
mi in e nose, fine open eyes, perhaps accentuated

128 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

in their gaze, and sharpened slightly in appearance be-
cause of the gold-rimmed spectacles which he always
wore. The lower part of his face indicated a substantial
modelling beneath his short beard and mustache. He
looked in every turn and expression the thoughtful, culti-
vated, amiable gentleman that he was, with an ever-
present suggestion of proper determination.

VIII
THE THEATRE AGAIN

It is difficult for a reader to measure the happiness of
a young man for whom the theatre has been the objec-
tive when he finds himself ensconced in a quasi-adminis-
trative position in a genuine playhouse. As assistant
treasurer it was my duty to open up the box-office in the
morning, to see that the bill-poster and his assistants re-
ceived the paper which the advance man brought in his
bill trunk; that the boys connected with the theatre
Kad their supply of hangers, lithographs and half sheets
that were to go into the windows of saloons, barber shops,
and hotels; to see that the scrub-women reported on
time and were at work; to sort the mail for the visiting
company and send that of the players to the stage door.

These duties carried one all over the building after the
treasurer arrived to relieve the assistant, and excuses
might even be made for visiting and looking over the
paint frame. Every theatre at that time had its resi-
dent artist. His shop was in the fly gallery; his studio
was a bridge at the back wall of the building, against
which a movable frame carried his colossal canvases up
and down. This artist was expected to get up each week
the scenes for the coming attraction. It must not be
supposed that he made a complete production in that
time. He had at his command a more or less sufficient
stock of scenery always stored away in a room adjoining
and accessible to the stage, with an opening between,
high enough to admit the flat scenes riding upright; this

129

castle interior and exterior, pents flat, a street, a gar-
den, cut-wood, forest, and horizon drops. To hold and
change these scenes the stage was arranged with runs
and grooves. These were sets of wooden guide tracks
on the stage and adjustable grooves corresponding some
eighteen feet above, arranged in groups about four feet
apart, beginning at the curtain line and numerically
designated. Their terminology still governs in the
theatre. An actor entered or made his exit in One, Two,
Three, or Four, right or left, as the case might be, or up
centre. He still does so, although the grooves with their
old sliding scenes that were pushed on to meet in the
middle, and separated to be quickly drawn off for a
change of scene, have disappeared.

It was upon this customary stock of scenery that the
scenic artist depended, supplementing it from time to
time with some new scene, of which sufficient warning
would generally be given, painted upon new canvas and
construction, or painted over one of the old scenes that
was seldom called for.

At the time of which Fm talking the old runs and
grooves existed in Pope's Theatre, but were beginning
to disappear from other houses projected at about that
time. They gave way to the clear stage with boxed
scenes now so common and which are supported in panels
by stage braces set behind each panel, with the panels
held together by lashings hung from the top and falling
over alternating cleats on the two joining edges.

Our paint frame at Pope's Theatre was presided over
by Ernest Albert, an artist to-day, both in the theatre

THE THEATRE AGAIN 131

and in the gallery, of international reputation. His as-
sistant was a blond and gentle lad named Frank E. Gates,
son of the old Si Gates who for many years was in charge
of the stage at the old Olympic. Frank Gates is now at
the head of one of the largest scenic studios of New York.

The brilliant artist, Ernest Albert, was not much, if
any, older than myself. He was a member of our St.
Louis Sketch Club, and there was always between us a
real artistic sympathy. It is probably because I knew
what Albert was trying to do and what he succeeded in
doing when physical conditions permitted that many of
the hours during which I was relieved from my watch
in the box-office I was allowed to put in on the paint
frame, where with an eagerness that equalled any pro-
tege of Tom Sawyer's I found delight in spreading flat
colors on the immense canvases.

Before the speculators and the agencies intervened,
and when the patrons of the theatre got their seats at
the box-office by a diagram on which they were permitted
to make their choice, there were few places of business
so interesting to the occupant as was the old box-office.
In ordinary times, from the hour that it opened up until
the window was pulled down for the day, there was no
such clearing-house for gossip, not even excepting the
celebrated rural sewing circle.

Pope's Theatre at Ninth and Olive streets was outside
the important business district, although upon a street
of the smaller and more exclusive shops. Also the most
fashionable car-line of the city was double-tracked past
its doors. Across Ninth Street to its left were a post-
office and custom-house, in their fine new granite struc-
ture, grand for that time. Facing the theatre immediately
across Olive Street was Pierre Lambert's three-story

ornamental railings ot cast-iron grape-vines leading to
the first porch.

Hancock the Superb had just been defeated for the
presidency, and sought a semi-retirement in one of the
two or throe apartments run in connection with this
Restaurant Porcher. At the hour of nine, when we were
to open up in the morning, the picturesque general, wear-
ing his Ben Butler hat, was often coming in leisurely
fashion to the sidewalk from this building. Men who
remember the Hancock campaign will recall Tom Nnst's
cartoon of Hancock seated on a platform with a placard
on the wall behind him— A Tariff for Revenue Only,
Hancock was depicted as leaning over to his neighbor
and privately asking, "Who is Tariff and why is he for
revenue only?"

The country was then laughing at Hancock's declara-
tion that the tariff was a local issue. The subsequent
alignment on the tariff quest ion of widely separated com-
munities as soon as they became interested in some local
manufacture indicated that Hancock was more nearly
right than were his critics. Perhaps it wits his courage
that inspired Andrew Carnegie, one of the tariff's greatest
beneficiaries, to say, somewhat later, that "the tariff
was the mother of the trusts.*'

At the theatre business men of some degree of leisure
and independence walking down from the residence dis-
tricts in the morning would stop in for their reservations.
Others would hurriedly drop off a car for the same pur-
pose. After the first run of buyers for the ordinary at-
traction, and when the lobby had then quieted clown
to the occasional straggler, the early afternoon news-

THE THEATRE AGAIN 133

paper men came by. They were followed by the bill
collectors and local advertisers. About eleven the fash-
ionable women, married and unmarried, made their calls.
It may be that the visiting actors showing up at about
that time had some determining influence. During the
lunch-hour there would be a run of the clerks and book-
keepers who tucked a call at the theatre into the noon
recess. After 2 130 big boys and girls from the high school
came into the lobby to look at the pictures. Later the
brokers walking home and the ladies combining a call
with their other shopping would drop in. Then there
were always members of the half-idle contingent who
found the lobby an excellent place to waste some portion
of every day.

I don't know why it is, but there has always seemed
to be a strong affinity between the young men in the box-
office and the snare drummer in the orchestra. There
were two drummers of considerable reputation in Pope's
orchestra during my time. One was Le Grand White,
the first husband of Minnie Maddern Fiske, married
romantically in St. Louis during her first starring en-
gagement. Miss Maddern had met Mr. White through
her uncle, Dick Maddern, who was then the conductor
in Pope's Theatre orchestra. The other drummer, who
succeeded White, was Frank David, who came to the
lobby every afternoon to give comic imitations and prac-
tise dance steps on the tiled pavement. A few years
later Frank was for a short time the most prominent
comedian on Broadway, having made a phenomenal hit
in the comic opera "The Pyramids." Another orchestra
leader at Pope's was William Witthers, who had been the
conductor of the orchestra at Ford's Theatre in Wash-
ington on the night Lincoln was shot.

134

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCK

Opposite the theatre, a little farther up the .same block
with the Restaurant Poreher, was the photograph gal-
lery of Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox was the father of two daugh-
ters. Lily Fox, the elder, then about sixteen years old,
was one of the prize beauties of tin- eity. She had a faee
that would have delighted Neysa MeMein as^a model
for a magazine cover, and I am sure still delights her
husband, Nat Roth, the general business manager in
New York for the Shuberts. Lily eame to the theatre
in the daytime chaperoning her little sister, Delia, then
about ten years of age, and available to the visiting or
local attractions as a child actress. Delia's first ap-
pearance on the stage, I think, was at Pope's Theatre
in "A Celebrated Case," with James O'Neill, After
Charles Thome, James O'Neill was then perhaps Amer-
ica's favorite romantic actor, but as modest and lovable
at the height of his popularity as he continued to the
day of .his recent death. His son, luigene, author of
"Emperor Jones" and "Beyond the Hori/on," promises
to surpass his noble father in enduring fame.

John Raymond was a great box-ofliee visitor. lie
would patiently stand through, five minutes of ticket-
selling or longer to get a half minute in which to match
silver dollars with the. treasurer. This form of gambling
was a passion with him. Frederick Warde brought with
him as leading man Henry Aveling, who married our
amateur heroine, Mittens Willett, and brought also a
juvenile man calling himself Ilallet Murray, %vho turned
out to be my old boy friend, Palmoni, of Washington
City.

Palmoni on that visit told me of the death a year or
two before of A. W., our old actor preceptor, us grand-
mother had intuitively reported it. Palmoni himself

THE THEATRE AGAIN 135

was a disappointed man. He had an ability that in legit-
imate parts could have overcome his lack of stature,
but he had a tendency to be stout enough to make him
undesirable in the roles.

Two years after the time of which I am writing he
died in New York City. With this confirmation of A.
W.'s death and the news of Palmoni's end a sustaining
interest passed from grandmother's horizon, and the
dear old lady began to fail more perceptibly than was
warranted by her advancing years alone.

In the box-office one made a fairly extensive acquain-
tance with the men employed in the local departments of
the newspapers, and now and then with some of the edi-
tors. Most prominent among the reporters who used
to visit the front of the house, and certainly the one best
known thereafter to the American reader, was young
William Marion Reedy, who later became the editor
and owner of the St. Louis Mirror, which for so many
years he conducted with such distinction. In the early
J8o's Reedy was a slight lad with a face noticeable for
its intelligence. He was interested, as most young men
on newspapers are, in the playhouse; and there began
then a friendship which was cemented when I went on
the newspapers myself a few years later, and which con-
tinued to the time of his death.

Among the men in the editorial department with whom
I enjoyed an intimate friendship was the gifted Colonel
John Cockerill, then acting as managing editor of the
Post-Dispatch. Colonel Cockerill was also president of
the Elks' Club, another member of which was his fairly
intimate friend, Alonzo W. Slayback. In a political
campaign of that time it became necessary for the paper
to speak critically of Slayback, and Slayback, who was

second reference.

The paper was hardly upon the street when Slaybaek,
accompanied by a mutual friend by the name of W. H.
Clopton, passed through the Post-Dispatch's local rooms,
and entered CockerilPs private ofliee. As he advanced
he drew a revolver, but before lie had time to use it
Cockerill had taken his own weapon from the table in
front of him and fired. Slaybaek wan instantly killed.
Cockerill drove to the police court, surrendered himself
and was locked up.

The news of the shooting was telephoned to the
theatre. I was on duty at the time. Mr. Pope consid-
erately took my place at the window and I went across
the town to the jail I was the first man in Coekerill's
cell, and remained with him until Johnny Norton, who
was his boon companion, came there. In the few min-
utes that we were alone together Colonel Coekeriil was
self-controlled, but plainly alive to the tragic character
of his act and the seriousness of his own situation. His
only reference to it all was when in commonplace I had
said: "Sorry, Colonel."

He nodded slowly as he answered, "Too had, but it
couldn't be helped."

Colonel Cockerill was released on hail and the case
was dismissed without being brought to trial. Whether
the tragedy terminated his usefulness in St. Louis or not,
it made continuation of his work there unpleasant to
him. He removed to New York, where he took charge
of the editorial page of the World. I saw him frequently
after 1889, when I came to make my home in the East.

THE THEATRE AGAIN 137

He became the president of the New York Press Club,
and gathered about him a small circle of agreeable and
influential friends, but it was my opinion that the Slay-
back killing clouded the rest of his brilliant life.

One outstanding recollection of that time at Pope's is
of William Gillette's first visit as a star. He came in his
own play, "The Professor," to my mind the most charm-
ing of the long list from his pen. Gillette was then under
the management of the Madison Square Theatre, his tour
directed by Gustave and Charles Frohman. An indica-
tion of the dignity with which affairs theatrical were
treated is in the advance illustrations by Kelly printed
in the newspapers and the programmes of the day.
These drawings, designed for clearness on rapid printing
presses, had as much artistic merit as the process per-
mitted. The two facing p. 1 38 show the character of the
work; give an idea of the costumes of 1880 and fairly
epitomize the story of "The Professor/' an attractive
but mature person beleaguered by lovelorn applicants
and challenged by younger and envious rivals. The
garments of the young men in the picture, especially
the lad with the short jacket buttoned tightly to the
neck, are worth a glance; the entangling trains of the
women, the Watteau pleats, their stays and bustles will
make the modern girl thank heaven for her freedom.

Another welcome visitor at the box-office was W. J.
Florence, familiarly known as Billy Florence, who with
his wife was jointly starring in the phenomenally suc-
cessful comedy, "The Mighty Dollar." Florence was the
projector and organizer of the Mystic Shriners, that
post-graduate playground of the thirty-second-degree
Masons. He and the elder Sothern, Lord Dundreary,
were boon companions.

138 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

One week when Sothern was playing at the Olympic
Theatre and Florence was at Pope's, Florence took a
carriage at the first intermission in his play, drove rapidly
to the stage door of the Olympic, which was half a mile
away, passed the doorkeeper and went onto the stage,
where Lord Dundreary was in the midst of a scene.
Waddling down from the centre door with his unctuous
laugh he grasped the hand of the astonished Dundreary,
and wished him health "by a large majority." The
crowded house, watching "Our American Cousin," im-
mediately recognized the star from the other theatre.
This prank occasioned a good deal of merriment at Pope's
when Florence got back and reported it. Its perpetration
had extended the intermission but slightly.

Florence and his wife were in the middle of their big
scene in the succeeding act when, to their great astonish-
ment, but to the equal delight of this second audience,
the lisping Dundreary minced in through the centre to
announce that he "had just had a letter from Sam."
He greeted both Florences effusively and departed. This
good-natured interchange has had many imitations since
that day, but I believe it was original with Florence.

One story of Florence concerned his first endeavor on
any stage. When as a lad engaged to keep out of sight
behind the scenes and on a given cue to bark like a dog,
which he could do, an actor asked: "What will you do,
Billy, if you get stage fright and can't bark?"

The boy answered, "I'll wag my tail," which showed
a ready sense of character.

Perhaps more than any other man in the theatre, with
maybe the exception of Joseph Jefferson, Florence num-
bered among his friends the important politicians of the
country. This may have been the consequence of his

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TWO SCENTES FROM "THE PROFESSOR," IN WHICH WILLIAM GILLETTE
APPEARED. 1882.

THE THEATRE AGAIN 139

admirable burlesque of a congressman as the Honorable
Bardwell Slote — and he had political ambitions himself.
After Cleveland's first election the belief was general
that Mr. Florence would be appointed ambassador to
France. Colonel Henry Watterson was the man who
brought the question to the attention of Cleveland. Al-
though Cleveland was numbered among the personal
friends of the actor, he was obliged to explain to Watter-
son that the church members of the country would not
forgive him if he appointed to an office of such promi-
nence a member of the theatrical profession.

James H. Hackett, the father of our present James K.
Hackett, lately made chevalier of the Legion of Honor
for his performance of "Macbeth" in Paris, was consid-
ered by playgoers the greatest American Falstaff. But
I have heard men who saw both claim the supremacy for
Ben De Bar. This old actor required very little padding
to realize the rotund knight, a favorite character with
him. De Bar also excelled in most of the low-comedy
parts of that repertoire. He was unsurpassed as Toodles,
and was the best Dogberry I ever knew. I saw him walk
away with the honors in an all-star performance of "Lon-
don Assurance" that was given for some charity in which
the brilliant Edwin Adams played Charles Courtly. A
good leading man of that time, one Metcalf, played Sir
Harcourt; Charles R. Pope was the Dazzle, and Ben De
Bar the Mark Meddle. I doubt if the play had had an
equal presentation in its first production in England
when the then young Dion Boucicault, its author,
wrote to his mother in Ireland, " I have London by the
throat."

Adams was then starring in "Enoch Arden" and some
Shakespearian parts. I saw his "Hamlet" that week.

i4o THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Many men of judgment in the theatre preferred it to all

others.

I have seen some thirty Hamlets, including Booth and
Barry Sullivan, but I think Adams the most thrilling of
them all in the scenes with the ghost, probably because
of his more melodramatic methods.

The boys in the box-office were always happy to have
C. W. Couldock come along, as he did in "Hazel Kirke"
and "The Willow Copse." We went with the old gentle-
man one night after the play to the Elks' rooms for sup-
per. The order had been given when the uneasy veteran
asked if there was not some place to which we could take
him where there would be sawdust on the floor, and he
could get an order of finnan haddie. There were just such
conditions in a room at Tony Faust's, two blocks away,
where we spent the rest of the evening with the coveted
smoked fish and some bumpers of beer.

Couldock at that time divided popular support as the
first old man of the country with James H. Stoddart.
He had spent his life in the theatre, been one of the most
prominent exponents of Louis XI and similar legitimate
parts, and could fill all the evenings of a week with stories
of the old days before we had fallen upon the degenerate
times, as he then measured the one in which we were.

Another very agreeable acquisition that came to one
in a box-office was the fraternity which it established
with the men in the other box-offices, and the informa-
tion that came through them concerning all current
theatrical happenings. At the Olympic Theatre the
treasurer was Mr. Dunn, who is still called Eddie, though
he must be within a few years of my own age, and has
had now the responsible position of general-manager for
Mr. George M. Cohan. I don't think I ever saw a more

THE THEATRE AGAIN 141

uniformly courteous and even-tempered person than
Mr. Dunn has been in a number of trying occupations.
In the old days the only railroad in the country that
advertised a four-track roadbed was the New York Cen-
tral. Eddie, who has always been a careful dresser, was
then the leader if not the misleader of fashion. He used
to wear in the box-office what he called his New York
Central shirt, which had four very decided stripes down
the bosom.

I think that both Mr. Dunn and I, as well as all others
that were ever in the theatre offices of St. Louis, will
accord to old George McManus credit of greatest pop-
ularity. There is scarcely any man who came into the
profession as early as twenty-five years ago who will not
remember him as a pleasant acquaintance and delightful
friend. After saying that he was the father of the pres-
ent George McManus, the talented artist who runs the
comic stories of "Bringing Up Father" and similar hu-
morous drawings in certain syndicate papers, it will be
interesting to the members of the Eugenics Congress to
note that this humor that has blossomed out in young
George through his illustrations found expression in the
father in an unbroken series of harmless practical jokes
of legitimate kinship to the absurdities depicted by young
George. A few of these are worth telling, because of
their character and the light they throw upon the mind
that got entertainment out of the disproportion between
common expectation and events.

On the wall of George McManus' box-office at the
Grand Opera House there was a strip of wood equipped
with what appeared to be four tenpenny nails on which
some coats and hats might be hung. Two of these nails
were usually occupied by garments. One of the remain-

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

ing two, although a tenpenny nail in appearance, was
a very artful imitation made of black car-spring rubber.
A regular nail had first been driven into the wood, then
withdrawn, and this rubber counterfeit substituted. Mc-
Manus got an average of one laugh a week out of this
by hanging his own coat on the good nail when it came
time to count up, and then watching the business man-
ager of the visiting company try to make his coat stay
in midair by passing the collar over this rubber nail.
It seemed to be a law of the human mind to assume that
the overcoat's fall to the floor was the result of a failure
to encompass the nail, and it sometimes took two or
three repeated attempts for the victim to discover the
deception.

Just over the office table, and affixed to the wall, was
an ordinary electric push button in its hard wooden plate.
When the laugh was over about the overcoat and the
two men were going to count up George would say,
"We'll have a drink on that," or a cigar, and osten-
tatiously push this electric button. A moment or two
after an aproned waiter from the adjoining barroom
would enter and inquire the pleasure of the gentlemen
who had summoned him. He really came because Mc-
Manus had arranged with an usher to go after him. The
button on the wall had no connection with anything ex-
cept the plaster.

Twenty-four hours would go by before McManus
could realize anything on this investment, and then upon
the second night the visiting agent would . in his turn
say, "Shall we have a drink now?"

George would assent, and the next half-hour would
witness the mounting irritation of the visitor as he inter-
mittently punched this dummy call-bell There were

THE THEATRE AGAIN 143

many of these devices, and some were being constantly
replaced. Just inside the box-office window was a gi-
gantic thermometer of the kind sometimes displayed
for advertising purposes outside the corner drug-store.
It was about three feet in length. When an agent of a
coming attraction arrived and began his preliminary
talk through the box-office window with McManus he
would be puzzled by George's turning to his assistant
and saying "Forty," or "Sixty," or some other number;
the explanation for which the agent would find a few
days later when he got the run of the office and saw the
decimal degrees on the thermometer variously marked
with the customary phrases of boastful advance men,
such as "Capacity in Cincinnati"; and "When I was
with Booth"; and so on. It was a salutary shock for
a pompous individual to find that he had fallen into a
tiresome category.

In the early '8o's there was an impression still current
in our sober city that economy is wealth. McManus
used to be annoyed by that section of the opera-house
patrons who, moved by this precept, lighted cigars dur-
ing the first intermission and then carefully left their
half-smoked butts resting on the wainscoting of the lobby
when the curtain went up and they were called inside.
McManus would then come from the box-office with a
squirt bottle of tabasco sauce, from which he carefully
shot two or three charges upon the chewed end of each
cigar. In the second intermission the man first to re-
cover his cigar was generally sport enough to try to con-
trol his sensation. But a dozen frugal patrons looking
their mutual confessions to each other made an amusing
ensemble.

In the contraband literature of our kid days Ned Bunt-

144 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

'< .1, '

line or some equal author used to write of Buffalo Bill.
One. day an advance agent arrived at Pope's and the
paper went up for this hero in his romantic play "The
Prairie Waif," The next Sunday night I had the great
happiness of mooting the Honorable William F. Cody.
I found that my admiration was shared by the preceding
generation. He and Pope were already great pals. Dur-
ing that engagement, in a buckskin suit which Buffalo
Bill lent him, Pope and the famous scout boys grown
tall --were photographed together seated over a stuffed
deer which the property man carried over his shoulder
to the gallery across the street.

This hero-worship is a great tendency. One of Cody's
engagements overlapped that of Male Salisbury, who
had his little company of live spiij;htly people John
Webster, Nellie McIIenry, John Com lay, Rae Samuels,
and Salisbury himself known as Salisbury's Troubadours.
Nate Salisbury came to he a tt;»,ure of international repu-
tation. At that time he was fixed in my mind principally
by a story that John Norton used to tell of one Charles
Salisbury, with whom I had confused him.

This Charles Salisbury as a voting man had written
from Chicago to Cincinnati asking an engagement for
utility business in the stuck company of Bob Miles, who
ran a theatre in that city. Miles had sent a negative
answer. Salisbury replied \\ith an oiler to go for forty
dollars a week, Miles refused this, Salisbury then tele-
graphed him, the .situation being urgent, that he would
accept the place at thirty dollars a week.

Miles, thoroughly anno\rd, wired back: "Mr. Salis-
bury, I don't want you at any price/'

Salisbury answered: "Terms accepted. Will be on in
the morning." And he came,

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THE THEATRE AGAIN 145

An equal push and energy, which manifested itself in
everything that Nate Salisbury did, was in harmony
with much that Cody had. Shortly after the two men
got together their great enterprise of the "Wild West,"
which ran for many years, was organized and launched.
Salisbury, knowing my railroad experiences, wished me
to take charge of its transportation department, moving
its large collection of animals and men. At that time,
however, I was filled with the project of a theatrical com-
pany of my own, and, wisely or unwisely, declined.

Toward the end of our second season in Pope's Barney
Macauley came to play a week in "The Messenger From
Jarvis Section/' He had with him a little girl named
Lizzie Evans playing the part of Chip, of which I believe
the child, Minnie Maddern, had been the original. His
leading man, Mr. Charles Mason, a very sterling actor,
still in the profession, was leaving him, and at Mr. Pope's
suggestion I went in on short notice to play the part of
Sandy Mitchell. The character of Keppler, a German
barkeeper in the play, was being played by the stage
manager, a young fellow about twenty years of age, with
remarkable eyes. They had most soulful and pathetic
appeal. This actor was a good comedian and a most
excellent stage manager. His name was Charles Klein.
He was even then interested in the subject of writing
plays, and was acting to get the experience so helpful
to a playwright. Before he went down on the ill-fated
Lusitania, Charles Klein had won his way to the fore-
most rank in his profession. Readers will remember his
"Music Master," "The Lion and the Mouse," "The
Third Degree," and other plays.

In an earlier chapter of this record I referred to the
discreet treatment of living persons by one writing that

••-3

146 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

is advised by men of experience. A decent respect for
this advice and such conferences as it has made desirable
have invited a few time-to-time advisers. One of these
is an attorney, old enough to serve upon any pardon
board, experienced, grave, dignified, and scholarly, and
not so much my senior in years as to be out of touch with
all my impulses. He frowns discouragingly at such
glimpses as he has had of my doings thus far. He wishes
that I would write with the restraint and gravity of John
Morley or Sir George Trevelyan, though of course not
curbing my genius to the mediocrity of either; that there
should be no audible laugh in the sessions, and that the
greatest relaxation should he only a genial glow indica-
tive of good-nature. He tells me that I am not on a wit-
ness stand; not under any compulsion to make a reve-
lation that will not read always to my advantage; and
moves further, upon my silent reception of this, by an
alarm for the interest of the helpless sensitive persons
whom I may involve.

That my father, who at the age of fifty, having met
with an accident that for a time prevented further pur-
suit of business, resumed the study of medicine inter-
rupted in his youth, and won his degree in an established
medical college, my counsellor submits is an unnecessary
statement, even though father's course in the college
required my co-operation at home, and to that extent
attached itself to my activities. Well, my adviser is
right; that is an unnecessary statement; but so is any
other statement in this whole performance. My own
present needs are not such nor is the financial return for
the promised output large enough to furnish me with
even the sordid excuse of Romeo's apothecary when part-
ing with the poison that "my poverty but not my will

535*

THE THEATRE AGAIN 147

consents." It is only fair to the publishers, however,
in this connection to say that a middleman, previously
indicated, has assured me that "they will come across
stronger next time."

But I think I could resist that inducement, too, if it
were not my belief that my father if living would himself
take pleasure in the recital. He lived to practise his
profession thirty years; to know his colleagues and his
clientele in that helpful, expanding, increasingly interest-
ing way that a physician's calling opens and the agree-
able atmosphere that it provides. He radiated what he
so acquired, and the studio in which I write and the sum-
mer places of which our domestics so fully approve would
lose much that makes them magnetized and restful if
the repeated visits of the sweetly aging doctor were un-
remembered.

When father was compelled to quit his work we had
as neighbor a Doctor Kent, member of the faculty of
the Homeopathic College, who approved of the sugges-
tion for father to resume the study of medicine. There
were some serious family discussions which narrowed
down to a talk between father and me. I found an in-
crease of income by undertaking to do more drawings
on boxwood for the engravers, and with this in sight
father consented to start in on his four-year course.
Looking back at that time over an interval of more than
forty years, I don't believe that I am exaggerating the
human interest of it. The positions of father and son
were in one respect completely reversed. He started off
to school with his books in the morning and came home
after his day's session and devoted his nights to study.
About him were the domestic problems. The important
thing was to meet these with the least call upon him, and

148 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

at the same time to keep up his spirits to the heroic thing
he had undertaken. I won't attempt the proper tribute
that belongs to the women of the family for their part
of this; they were unwavering in the brave front they
presented to father and the atmosphere of content that
they created.

My job in addition to that already indicated was to
establish a comedy view of the thing; to call the medical
student to account for implied truancy and theatrically
to assume the role of a grouchy stage father bringing up
an incorrigible son. About once a week I pretended to
get favorable reports from the teachers, and would re-
ward their pupil with a visit to the theatre, on which I
accompanied him during the time I was in the law-office
and in which I joined him when we had counted up at
Pope's after I had gone there. As a matter of both eco-
nomy and companionship he and I used to walk home —
two miles. My interests were theatrical; father's ex-
periences were largely so; and the talks that started as
far as I was concerned in a deliberate intent to divert
his thoughts always finished in a real abandonment to
the subject, with both of us in the happiest earnestness.

The last attraction at Pope's Theatre during my em-
ployment there was the celebrated Yokes family. At
the end of their week they separated; the girls, Victoria,
Rosina, and Jessie, and the brother, Fawdon, going back
to England. Fred Vokes, however, the principal mem-
ber and manager of the enterprise, had a play in mind
which he wished to try in America during the summer;
a farcical contrivance which he called "In Camp." He
engaged me to undertake the part that had been origi-
nally intended for Fawdon Vokes. When the new com-
pany, which immediately assembled, found itself together

THE THEATRE AGAIN 149

in Buffalo, all rooming at the old Mansion House, the
principal members were Pauline Hall, later trie comic-
opera star; Minnie ScKuItz, a soprano, at that time the
wife of the talented Louis Harrison; and Miss Helen
Dingeon, a soprano of power and reputation. The prin-
cipal men were Owen Westford, a very excellent come-
dian, and a young man named Byron Douglas, who later
became an established leading man.

When rehearsals should have begun we discovered that
Vokes had no script whatever, but only an idea for a
play. All of us boys thereupon sat down with pen, ink,
and paper to help him. Together we finally ground out
a hodgepodge not unlike a modern musical play. All
that is important to note of that engagement is that in
one of the off hours, in a wrestling bout, Westford had
the misfortune to break an ankle, so that his Buffalo
engagement was played on crutches.

Our next important stand after Buffalo was Chicago,
where we arrived on a rainy Sunday, none of us with
any money. Westford, Pauline Hall, and I, forming one
little coterie, went on foot in the rain in search of a hotel.
The old Matteson House, later the Wellington Hotel, was
situated on Wabash Avenue. The desk was approached
by a corridor some sixty feet in length and twenty wide.
A pompous clerk glared at our party as we came in from
the drizzle and stood at the front door. Westford being
on crutches, I went up to the desk to negotiate for quar-
ters. The hotel was on the American plan.

I said, "What is the rate for board and room?"
The clerk answered, "Three dollars."
"What is your professional rate for actors?"
Looking over my head into vacancy, the clerk an-
swered, "Three-fifty."

• i

i5o THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

We went a few blocks farther on to a little rooming-
house called the Windsor, with a second-floor office,
where one could get a comfortable room at a dollar a
day. When the Chicago engagement was fairly launched
my colleagues in St. Louis were far enough advanced
with their plans for a company of our own for me to quit
the Yokes enterprise and go home.

In the early days of his popularity as a singing tramp,
Walter Jones, our prominent farceur of to-day, used to
recite some verses written by Ben King of the old White-
chapel Club of Chicago, expressing the tyranny of the
preposition. As I remember, the first lines ran:

"Nowhere to go but out,
Nowhere to come but back,
No place to stand but on,
Nowhere to fall but off."

In my few essays at a career up to the time of which
I am telling there had uniformly been no place to come
but back. I never came back, however, with more eager-
ness than from my experience in that summer season
with Fred Yokes; or with more welcome or greater hap-
piness upon my arrival. My father, who had got his
diploma from the college, was now set up as doctor and
building a little practice that made it possible for me
without excessive selfishness to try somewhat for myself.
In our leisurely review and stock taking as I sat with
him that midsummer, he now the breadwinner and I
the adventurer, we talked over the period covering
slightly more than a decade since I had come back from
Washington. How full the time had been ! What pros-
perity the country had had 1 What a growth in its activ-
ities! What a reaching out of its markets! What a
turmoil in its political agitations !

THE THEATRE AGAIN 151

A syndicate of newspapers, the Scripps-McRae League,
had established a penny paper in our city, among others ;
copper coins were really beginning to circulate west of
the Mississippi and south of the Ohio; merchants were
marking down goods from five dollars to four-ninety-
eight; newsboys were making change for less than a
nickel; my old friend, General Benjamin Butler, by
some turn of the whirligig found himself politically asso-
ciated with the sand-lot agitator, Dennis Kearney, of
California, who originated the slogan, "The Chinese
Must Go!" with whose blatherskite ambitions I felt a
perhaps reprehensible but not inexplicable sympathy;
what was called the National Party had been organized
with strength enough to pass the Greenback Bill for fiat
money; the bill had gone through both Houses of Con-
gress and been stopped only by the stubbornness of
Grant, who vetoed it; our own corn-tassel statesman of
Missouri, Richard Bland, far outrunning the subsequent
vision of the peerless leader of Nebraska, had put through
a bill making silver the sole basis of our national cur-
rency; Grant had vetoed this also; and then for the
first time since 1862 gold, gradually dropping, had
reached par and the country was again on a bi-metallic
basis with specie payment resumed. The negroes had
achieved civil rights; probable war had been averted by
the patriotism of Tilden, who counselled patience and
the submission to arbitration of the contested election
between himself and Hayes, which put the latter in the
presidential chair by a vote of eight to seven in the com-
mission organized for that hearing; Garfield had come
into the presidency and been assassinated by a madman,
Charles Jules Guiteau, of Chicago; Guiteau had been
tried, convicted, executed; the great Eads Bridge had

i52 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

been opened; the Father of Waters was no longer the
barrier to the railroad communication of the two great
longitudinal sections of the country.

In my own little personal world there had been an
almost commensurate exfoliation of events and hopes;
far beyond my most vivid expectations I had been given
an inside knowledge of the theatre in all its departments
as much as any city in the Union other than New York
could provide such initiation. Besides the actors I have
mentioned, I had been permitted to witness repeated
performances by the beautiful Mrs. Scott Siddons; I
had seen the incomparable Marie Geistinger, equally ex-
cellent in opera, drama, and comedy; had seen and be-
come acquainted with the famous Bostonians, with Tom
Karl, Henry Barnabee, Will McDonald; had seen Salvini
in his heroic work with such splendid support as Lewis
Morrison and Marie Prescott gave. I had studied the
perfect work of the well-balanced New York companies,
from the Union Square, Palmer's, and the Madison Square
theatres; had become personally acquainted with Steele
Mackaye, with whom I was to have a profitable friend-
ship until his death, when the acquaintance would be
carried on with his gifted and poetic son, Percy Mackaye,
also a playwright; had made and begun a lifelong friend-
ship with the matchless Robert G. IngersoII; had made
friendships that lasted till their death with many others
that have gone, and friendships that still continue with
many who remain. Among the departed are Digby Bell,
Joseph Arthur, George R. Edeson, father of our present
Robert Edeson; Stuart Robson, McKee Rankin, Frank
Mayo, Charles Wyndham, Harry Pitt, Dan McGinnis,
and a host of others. Of those still playing I had come
to know William Gillette, Francis Wilson, the sturdy

THE THEATRE AGAIN 153

William Muldoon, De Wolf Hopper, William Crane,
Forrest Robinson, Henry Miller, the veteran Charles
Stevenson, who along with John Drew is one of the few
survivors of the older and classic school, now flexibly
adapting himself to the later methods. I had met nearly
all the responsible and irresponsible players who still
play and were then travelling. I had come to know the
ablest managers of the time, and the younger men that
were to succeed them. One particular friendship to
which I owe so much was with the late Charles Frohman,
who dominated the American theatre until he was lost
on the torpedoed Lusitania.

THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB

In the summer of 1883, when I had come back from
the Yokes Company hoping to start organizing what
ultimately proved to be the little theatrical company
called the Dickson Sketch Club, I had a fair knowledge
of the kind of material of which actors were made, and
some measure of audiences too; but I felt that the ex-
perience to be had in a tour would give a knowledge of
audiences in general most desirable to a playwriter. He
would learn the kind of line and business that would
please not only the people with whom he had been
brought up but all kinds to whom he would be fortunate
enough to play and ultimately to write for — the alto-
gether American audience and the one that would be a
mixture of many nationalities.

With this in mind I began my last season in Pope's
box-office, having several months ahead for preparation
of material and enlistment of help. The task in detail
of getting material, organizing a company, playing in it
and going with it in a trial through small towns was a
varied experience, of which an intimate telling will prob-
ably interest others besides equally ambitious amateurs.
Looking for some one who could play the child in
"Editha's Burglar," our attention naturally went to
Delia Fox, who was the professional infant around the
theatre, and who a few years later became the light-
opera prima donna with the Comley Barton Opera Com-

154

THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB

pany, and still later the featured lead with De Wolf Hop-
per in "Wang" and other Broadway successes. She also
introduced the Delia Fox curl in the middle of the fore-
head, which became the fashion from Maine to the Pa-
cific.

Edgar Smith, now the prominent playwright, was at
that time working very rebelliously in a gas-fixture es-
tablishment in St. Louis, a branch of a New York house
in which his father was a partner. Edgar had been
launched upon this attempt at a commercial career by
his father in order to get him away from Daly's Theatre,
where he had been a minor member of the resident com-
pany and a fairly important one of a company that went
on the road. With us amateurs of his own age this gave
him authority. At that time he was a slight and dis-
tinguished-looking person about five feet eleven inches
tall, and as fine a young man physically and facially and
in deportment as one would wish to see. His profile was
regular, and his expression had the high, open-eyed, self-
confident quality of a French marquis. He sang ac-
ceptably; he spoke with well-bred pronunciation and
tone. The idea of a little company that we could call our
own appealed to him thoroughly. He became a third
owner in the enterprise. His choice as the exponent of
anything romantic that we might play was conceded
and fixed.

Frank David, the drummer I have referred to as often
dancing in the lobby of the theatre during the hours he
was off duty, was naturally mimetic. His work in the
orchestra had required that his attention should at least
be synchronized with the slap-stick and knockabout ele-
ment of the performance in which his drum and cymbals
assisted. Mr. Wilton Lackaye once remarked that rep-

156 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

artee was largely a matter of repertoire. It may be that
many entertaining personal properties have the same
origin. David, as drummer student, had a repertoire;
he was our principal comic.

Another possible member of our company, a product
of the business, was William Sullivan, whom we dis-
cussed as a second comedian. He had been brought up
around the theatre, being successively errand boy, usher,
and bill-poster. Memory, when at all associated with
genius, is selective. Sullivan's memory had fixed for
him every trick of every Irish player that had made a
week's stand in the city of St. Louis during his time.
His particular model had been that fine Irish actor, Hugh
Fay. Sullivan could give an imitation of Fay, not only
in the things he had seen Fay do, but in any new ma-
terial that he imagined Fay undertaking. These, men —
Smith, Dickson, David, Sullivan, and myself — had many
conferences over our plans. We felt that "Editha's
Burglar" was a sufficient piece de resistance. But this
playlet represented only twenty-five minutes. With a
ten-minute intermission added, it still left two hours of
entertainment to be devised.

Smith and I set about together to devise a comedy
that would contain songs and dances and an equal op-
portunity to put into the show-window what we thought
we and our associates individually and collectively pos-
sessed or could develop. We turned out a two-act con-
coction which we called "Combustion," and which we
all thought up to our dress rehearsal was a very funny
and sufficient vehicle to carry the last half of our eve-
ning; but it was neither. To this rehearsal, which was
held in Pope's Theatre on the Sunday evening before
our opening, which was to be in the little town of Mexico,

THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB 157

Missouri, we invited enough of our acquaintances com-
fortably to fill the parquet.

"Editha's Burglar" did all that we had expected of it.
The audience was enthusiastic. Our two acts of "Com-
bustion," with an ample intermission, went less than an
hour and a half. Our comedy wasn't very good, and it
was thirty minutes too short. After the play we knew
enough of the theatre to call the company for a rehearsal
at noon next day. Edgar Smith and I met in the morn-
ing for heroic work. While merely trifling and waiting
about at moments during the weeks of preparation it
had been the occasional practice of David, Smith, Sulli-
van, and myself to get together and sing what were known
in those days as barber shops — quatrains from the pop-
ular songs, with very close harmony at effective points,
all marked out and rehearsed by David. We would do
one or two of those. In one of the Yokes comedies Fred
had a table scene in which he endeavored to carve a tough
fowl. This was an old stunt with him, thoroughly elab-
orated and filled with all manner of tricks, from shooting
the resisting bird into a lady's lap to pursuing it with his
knife up and down the legs of the table, where he led it
with his fork. As there was a dinner scene in our piece,
we resolved to introduce that foolery, with which I was
perfectly familiar. Three or four other interpolations
convinced us that we could pad up the evening to some-
thing like the required length. We cued in these few
turns and got ready to leave town, a very apprehensive
bunch of inexperienced barnstormers.

On the day of our departure from St. Louis we were
in a higher degree of excitement than even young people
can attain for the ordinary embarkation. We had spent
a morning patching equipment, and it was therefore

THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB 159

performance of what simple people of the Middle West
called a good show.

The little playhouses of that time were more inade-
quately equipped behind the scenes than they were in
front. Sometimes, not often, a curtain had to separate
the dressing-room of the men from that of the women.
In one little town whose name and locality I have for-
gotten there was no dressing-room at all, nor room for
one. We were expected to do what every company that
visited the town did: We dressed in a shop that was
occupied by a cobbler in the daytime and lent to the
theatre at night. It was some forty feet from the stage
door, and on the night I have in mind we all of us — men,
women, and the little girl — covered the distance between
these two places in the rain.

In Muscatine, Iowa, a pretty little town on the west
bank of the Mississippi, the theatre was a second-story
room, built over some stores on the main street. It was
lighted by coal-oil lamps, three or four of them behind
tins for footlights, and a large one, a circular burner,
hanging permanently above the middle of the stage.
The machinery of these lamps was not in the best con-
dition, but the audience felt perfect confidence in the
watchfulness of the janitor, who sat in the front row,
with his attention divided between the play and these
coal-oil burners.

Smith and I had reached the most effective and dra-
matic part of the Burglar sketch when this tall figure
rose from the front row of kitchen chairs and said with
irresistible authority, "Wait a minute! Wait a min-
ute!"

We stopped. There was no laugh in the audience, no
protest. The man climbed onto the stage, which was

158 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

only by crowding appointments that I was able to re-
spond to a call from George McManus to be sure and
see him at the Grand Opera House before leaving town.
I had only five minutes at his window, but he said he
could deliver his message in even less time. A great
many companies were coming to grief at that time in
the West — organizations with New York records and
indorsements — and here we were, a little band with not
even a St. Louis pronouncement of our complete product,
with no reputation as an organization, and not any as
individual members, almost asking for disaster.

With the most serious face in the world, and of course
with all these facts in mind, McManus said to me, "What
is your first big stand?"

I told him Minneapolis. He took pad and pencil, put
down relatively two dots, one marked St. Louis and one
marked Minneapolis. He then drew an arrow between
them, indicating general direction. "You see," he said,
"going up you are going northwest." He drew a parallel
arrow, but reversed, and then added, "Coming home
you will be going southeast; just remember that."

With this pessimistic implication to be shaken off, I
joined my friends and made the train.

Our first stand, Mexico, Missouri, was then a railroad
town with probably three thousand inhabitants, but
enough surrounding population to justify its little wooden
opera-house. The audience was not critical. We were
delightfully surprised, as theatrical people often are, to
discover that the material added hurriedly as after-
thoughts was of the most effective. Our little barber-
shop quatrains went so well that we had to repeat them.
The next day, moving to the next town, we added two
or three encores. In a week we were giving a smooth

THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB 161

upon which these products depended; the human ca-
pacity of the individual to be interested in the work at
hand, and kindred things, were always as entertaining
as a storybook.

After we had been out a short while we were joined by
Will Smythe, who came to us in the capacity of business-
manager. The late William G. Smythe — or as we knew
him familiarly, Billy Smythe — remained in the theatrical
business as manager or producer until he died in Sep-
tember, 1921, while occupying a position as David Bel-
asco's booking-agent.

They treated us rather well in Minneapolis. The
papers, morning and evening, were complimentary. But
I have always attributed much of this to the influence
of W. C. Edgar, editor of the Northwestern Miller, pub-
lished in Minneapolis and at that time owned by Charles
Palmer, who subsequently became business-manager of
the New York American.

One night after the play Smith, Smythe, David, and
I went to Edgar's and played poker. I think some one
in our party must have won a little, because we were
coming back in excellent good-nature. As we neared
the Hennepin House, the hotel at which we were stay-
ing, we became aware of some excitement about the
place, and a gathering of fire-engines, one of which was
still working, indicating that we had come in at the finish
of a fire. This proved to have been in a small building
to the rear of the hotel. The crowd that still remained
was intensely interested in an excited individual who
was looking from one of the small windows under the
eaves on the topmost floor of the hotel, which was about
six stories high. This person was calling in a most com-
plicated German dialect, asking if he should throw his

i6o THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

only about three feet high from the floor, pulled his
kitchen chair after him, set it in the middle of the scene,
stood on it, turned down the lamp overhead, very care-
fully regarded it a moment with the eye of an expert,
got down, took the chair, retired to the floor of the audi-
torium, turned and waved to us with a peremptory "Go

on!"
We went on. The audience was evidently used to this

as a regular feature of the visiting entertainments. It
was, however, pretty hard for Smith and me to look each
other in the eye and proceed with the lines, especially
with the wheezy laughter of the company half smoth-
ered in the wings.

Our various stays, measured by hours, in these little
towns differed of course, being governed as they were
by the time of the arriving and departing trains and the
distance to the next stand. Often we got in comfort-
ably late in the forenoon, had time to see that our scenery
and baggage reached the theatre and was properly placed,
and then found ourselves with an entire afternoon at our
disposal in some picturesque little place, full of interest
for the visitor. There might be a lake or a little stream
with rowboats; there was always a stable with accept-
able saddle-horses, and if one were a walker two or three
minutes took him into the lanes and fields outside.

My own interest in every part of America had been
stimulated by early political associations. The men I
remembered with admiration had come from little dis-
tricts such as these all over the country. The features
that characterized these districts, to some of which we
now were going; the products that made them valuable
in contributing to the welfare of the commonwealth; the
relation of the plain, wise, sturdy people to the tasks

trunk from the window; calling for somebody to put up
a ladder; making all kinds of appeals to the crowd that
was hooting at him from below. It didn't take our party
long to recognize this excited roomer as our Irish come-
dian, Billy Sullivan, who had not been invited to the
poker party, but had met much more entertainment at
home.

In the hotel corridor we found one of the clerks com-
plaining of this performance and that the door was locked
and he couldn't get into the room. Sullivan, answering
our calls over the transom, admitted us. He was highly
elated over the attention he had attracted, and was a
perfect hero in the eyes of little Delia, who had come
across the hall in her wrapper to prompt him in this
escapade. Papers reporting the fire the next morning
carried a serious account of this frightened German, who
was saved from jumping only by the cries of citizens
below.

On this first trip it was a great happiness for us to
meet such able men writing for the theatre as George
Goodale of Detroit, Elwyn Barron, Teddy McFeelam,
and Biff Hall of Chicago, and the men of equal serious-
ness in the other cities, all of whom without exception
spoke of the comedy, "Combustion," as being enter-
taining, clean, full of fun; commending it more or less
in the vein of one writer who said: "The only wonder
is how and where so small a party collected such a budget
of amusing nonsense." These criticisms were valuable
not only in addressing the public when we were again on
tour the following season, but they were influential with
theatrical owners everywhere in getting time. It must
be remembered that in 1884 there were no theatrical
syndicates. Men who owned theatres had not delegated

THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB 163

to any central authority in New York or elsewhere the
task of putting attractions in their theatres. They were
not linked in a chain. Each manager selected his own
attractions and each company corresponded by letter
and by wire voluminously to organize suitable tours.

The regular bill of our company was "Editha's Bur-
glar" and "Combustion." We had, however, two or
three other little things, such as Gilbert's "Sweethearts"
and Bernard's "His Last Legs." "His Last Legs" had
a longer cast than we were well prepared for. We met
this by having Smythe come from the front of the house
and play ojd Mr. Rivers, and by changing the footman
to a housemaid and giving that part to little Delia; and
she was very cute in it too. Our second comedian, Sulli-
van, had to be cast as a walking gentleman, one Doctor
Banks. This was a role quite within the capacity of any
utility man in the world, but as he had to wear a high
hat and gloves and present O'Callaban with a card in
the front scene and speak a serious line or two about
looking for a long-lost daughter, the pretense of it was
so far afield of anything Sullivan had ever imagined
himself doing that he was almost panic-stricken with the
assignment. This was in no wise relieved by the con-
duct of Delia, who considered it her business on the tour
to regard Sullivan as her particular play boy of the West-
ern world. In and out of the theatre these two were given
to guying each other and to practical jokes.

Delia had a little sand jig to do in "Combustion." It
was quite good enough and up to the standard of that
time, and I am sure Sullivan thought well of it; but he
made it very difficult for the little girl by standing in the
wing when nobody in authority was around and dra-
matizing the insufferable torture that it gave him to wit-

THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB 165

not superior to it, and many an hour in the afternoons
was used up by visits to the rink. Mr. Smythe was gen-
erally busy during these times with his books or his other
business duties. Sullivan inferred from this that Smythe
was afraid of the roller skates, and he thought it would
be fine fun to lure him to a rink and then laugh at his
mishaps when he had been equipped with a pair of skates.
Smythe evaded these attempts for a time, but finally
consented.

I must confess that all of us had more or less indirectly
assisted Sullivan in his plan. We were all present on the
afternoon in mind; we stood about while Sullivan care-
fully strapped the skates onto Smythe. We restrained
our laughter as Sullivan and David with difficulty helped
him from his seat to a prominent place on the smooth
floor of the rink, and then left him alone and unsup-
ported. To the surprise of all, however, Smythe' s first
move was to go into what is called the spread-eagle, a
difficult figure, with the heels together and the toes point-
ing in opposite directions. From this he passed on to
cutting a few figure eights, and finished with a pirouette
on his toes that would have done credit to any profes-
sional. We had all coaxed an expert with medals into
this intended exhibition of a tyro !

Little Delia Fox was a pupil of Nellie Page, who was
our leading woman. The Fox and Page families were
neighbors and friends, and Delia was placed in the care
of Miss Page during her tour with us. One of the con-
ditions of her being permitted to go with us was that
she was to carry her schoolbooks, and her studies were
not to be abandoned. The role of pedagogue was mine.
As we weren't paying salaries with any regularity, and
as her money went home anyway, the usual theatre fine

164 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

ness her pretended skill. Delia's turn to get even came
when Sullivan had to walk on as a gentleman in the part
of Doctor Banks. Her scenes followed closely upon his
own, and during all his time on the stage Delia was in
the prompt entrance with clinched fists and agonized
looks to heaven.

After his first performance of the part Sullivan de-
clared that he would never go on for it again; but there
was no choice between doing so and leaving the com-
pany. With each added performance his distress
mounted, until by the time we had finished the season
Doctor Banks was a nightmare with him. He studied
the route ahead in his effort to figure out where we might
possibly want to put up that bill. Will Smythe, a good
deal of the joker himself, would occasionally invade the
smoking-car with a forged telegram from some manager
ahead asking for this comedy of "His Last Legs," and
read it to me or to Smith loudly enough for scraps of it
to reach Sullivan across the aisle.

The name of the character, Doctor Banks, finally passed
into Sullivan's vocabulary as descriptive of any inade-
quate person in life. Occasionally when he lost his tem-
per about something else and had exhausted the polite
and impolite expletives at the command of the average
tough he would finish by adding that the party under
condemnation was a regular Doctor Banks. Language
could convey no more.

The theatre all over the country at that time was suf-
fering from the competition of roller skating, which was
then a craze. The rinks throughout the country made
as much of a bid for persons who would otherwise have
gone to the theatre as the motion pictures now make.
Though as actors we disapproved of this fad, we were

THE DICKSON SKETCH CLUB 167

Delia answered: "I've been in a calaboose all night."

She looked it.

I think I should tell of our advance man, Frank Hamil-
ton, because in some other important business ventures
and episodes growing out of them Hamilton and I were
intimately associated. He was not quite thirty years
old, but looked a bit older. You could safely call him
colonel or judge in any group without risking doubt of
your seriousness. For a short time he had been an ac-
tor; for a shorter time an unsuccessful star. He had
the most unbounded confidence in himself and his ca-
pacity to carry out anything that he undertook; but
as soon as Hamilton filled in all the outlines of any sud-
den conception, and was able fairly to communicate the
figure to one or two other minds, he was ready to abandon
it for some newer and more inviting dream. Sometimes
where there was a gap in the route the duty to get a date
for us fell to him. His optimism concerning the business
we would do at any place he selected and thought about
was sufficient for him to feel guaranteed in the required
railroad journey, however long. My only venture as the
owner of a newspaper was following one of Hamilton's
will-o'-the-wisps. The only time I felt I was sharing the
lease of a theatre was when we went arm in arm after
another prospect.

Getting home from this try-out trip of ours as we did
late in June, with the intention of beginning a regular
season toward the end of August, left us players with not
much more than six weeks' vacation, which we employed
leisurely improving material we had as to text and in
getting new songs, and the like. The trip had been vastly
interesting and educational, but there was salary owing
to the company, and unpaid paper bills at the local

166 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

for a breach of discipline meant nothing, but to fine her
one extra lesson was effective.

Outside her studies she had a child's curiosity in all
questions raised by the features of our shifting environ-
ment. This was generally satisfied by some member of
the company, but not in the spirit of seriousness that
should guide an education. There was a disposition,
especially on the part of the men, to tease rather than to
inform. For example, meeting the word frequently on
the bills of fare, Delia wanted to know, "What is a
veal?" Everybody tried to describe it to her in terms
of elimination; it wasn't as large as a cow; didn't have
wings like a chicken, and so on; and all so seriously that
Delia went through the season, hurrying now and then
to the car window, but always too late to see a veal that
we had just passed. In the beautiful little city of Madi-
son, Wisconsin, business was bad because there was a
meeting of the alumni that competed. Delia wanted to
know what an alumni was. Smythe was trying to tell
her in the usual way, eliminating colors, wings, and the
like. Delia, hoping to make better progress by com-
bining ideas, asked if it was anything like a veal. Smythe
told her it was very much like a veal, only it didn't know
so much.

It was not always possible to get first-class trains.
On more than one trip we had to be content for a short
jump with the company huddled in with the trainmen
in their caboose. One awkward booking forced us
into that kind of travel overnight. We reached our
hotel early in the morning. Delia walked to the hotel
desk.

The clerk, noticing her dishevelled appearance, said:
"What's the matter, kid?"

ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD

Those were sad vacation days, divided as were our
hopes and our actual prospects. Mr. Dickson bravely
argued that we had done all that we had any reason to
expect in the way of business. We had a perfected enter-
tainment and a scrap-book of notices that many a New
York manager would have given thousands of dollars
rightly to own. Furthermore, the offers for return dates
in the regular season were most reassuring. One menace
lay in the fact that nearly every member of the com-
pany had received some flattering offer from other man-
agers who had seen our work in Minneapolis, Milwaukee,
or Chicago.

My first meeting with A. L. Erlanger, for so many
years the head of the syndicate that later controlled the
business of the American theatres, and still in that posi-
tion, was at the end of this summer. Mr. Erlanger, then
a young man, probably younger than I was, as he is now
younger than I am, was managing the first financial ven-
ture of magnitude on his own account. This was a play
called "Dagmar," of which the star was Louise Balfe.
I had been in to see it on Tuesday night of its early week
at Pope's, and was in the lobby of the theatre during an
intermission when Dickson called me and introduced
us. The young manager said that he would like me to
replace his leading man, an actor by the name of William
Harris, not related to either of those prominent managers
of New York, the late William Harris or the present

i68 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

printers', the Springer Lithograph Company. What-
ever our trip had proved besides, it had certainly shown
that we were not a paying enterprise in a spring season
over small time in the Middle West.

ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD 1?I

My refusal In <-,o with "Dammar" tit a hundred dollars
showed me how IruK at he-art I preferred our little home
company. My own -wavering was over, and the other
boys fell into line for n 14' try at a real tour, AK 1 looked
over Diekson's route sheets for tiie coming season, fairly
filled as they were for the early months, ant! for later
ones marked out uith indicated points of importance
between which we .should manoeuvre the tissue of con-
necting engagements, I had a great eagerness, inspired
by the prospect of Midi a scuk.<m in a little commonwealth
company wherein were no stars, where the proprietors
were comrades and where liahy-^irl and impecunious
owner and accomplished manager got each the demo-
cratic salary of fortv dollais- n week, with no guaranty
and infrequent reali/atiun. You can't #o far wrong on
forty dollars a week; hut if vmi are willing to waive its
collection and transmute the debt into railroad tickets
with an interiniitently em-urn afjng patronage you can
cover a lot of f.inund.

Starting on tins ir^ular season, we naturally recovered
the territory of oui tiv-tmt. The* people remembered
us and we did not du Imdly. One of tliose filling-in jumps
referred to as .some-times made by our advance man
carried us from Stillwaler, Minnesota, to Winnipeg,
Manitoba, broken only by u stttp at St. (.loud, about
seventy-live miles uniih of St. Paul, The round trip
was all based on Hamilton's hopes of Winnipeg, inspired
by some glmung drxjipiinn In* a local manager. Still-
water is a beautiful little t«»wn on the St, (Iroix River,
almost due east of Mitmeapniis. V\V were playing there
Friday night, and made St. Cloud for Saturday, and then
had Sunday to j-.et iut*> Winnipeg and prepare for the
week. To do this we were to make a very early start

i7o THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

William Harris, his son, and that he would pay me
seventy-five dollars a week, a large salary for a road lead-
ing man at that time. I deelined the offer and went on
my errand to the near-by cafe. He met me again during
the following intermission and raised the olfer to one
hundred dollars, which I also deelined.

During the last year of the World War, K)i8, I was at
Mr. Erlanger's dinner-table in New York with a number
of men who were discussing some war aid in which the
theatres were interested. To my astonishment he re-
ferred to that first meeting at Pope's thirty-Four years
before. lie asked me if I remembered my reasons for
refusing to go with the company, and told, to the amuse-
ment of the company, that I had said: "1 won't; go, be-
cause I think you have a had play which should be in
the storehouse." And the Napoleon of managers laughed
heartily at this freshness.

"But Thomas was right/' he added, "and I should
have saved money by taking his advice at the time,"

I then told him of a reinforcement that had been given
to my estimate of the play. Before- I had gone into the
theatre on that Tuesday night I had met. our Diekson
Sketch Club comedian, Billy Sullivan, whoso anguish at
having to play a straight part 1 have related. The week
before Mr. Erlanger's engagement in the theatre the at-
traction had been one Ada Richmond, a rather indilferent
type of burlesque woman in as had a performance as
could be imagined.

I said to Sullivan, "How is the 'Dagrnar' piece?"

With a seriousness that intensified the unconscious
humor of his remark, he answered: "Why, (Jus, it's
a case of Ada Richmond with a whole cast of Doctor
Bankscs!"

ADVKNTURKS ON THE ROAD 173

guidance of this little tow-headed North American we
went in) to the proper station in St. Paul fifteen minutes
ahead of the time. We \\ere able to p-t sandwiches and
some eo flee at a stand in the terminal and make our train,
on which we had the satisfaction of seeing the ear with
our scenery and buwwr already hnnked. This put Sul-
livan and me into the town of St. Cloud early in the after-
noon. We had the scenes Net and the ba^a^e distributed
for the company that arrived at eij*ht. We also had time
to get out some hand-bills and explain t«» the little com-
munity, who had seen no compan\ arrive tipmi the morn-
ing train, the situation as it stnod, and promise them the
plays as advertised in the evening.

When we got into Winsttpc/, \ve uere astonished to
find that it was winter. It vsa-; lute autumn in the States'.
But in this eily of Manitnbu the j'.iound uns covered with
snow. All vehicles hail been taken I mm their wheels
and were upon runnel'.; the toads \\ete already packed.
The hotel at which we stepped was itttrd with storm
sashes outside the working windows, closed in for the
winter siege.

Despite the optimism of Hamilton and die Denial hopes
of the local manager, we didn't open to much business.
There is always «n excuse in a little town for bud busi-
ness; the local manager bus alibis. They befjn about,
a quarter of ei^ht, when the house is not promising, by
his assertion that the people come late; and iinish by his*
suddenly reiwrnbnmf, that therr is a church sociable or
gathering of equal itupMtlimee, or s»*mr local political
excitement that explains ihr lack of pationn^t4. 1'he
saddest excuse thai vmi can ftft is thitt thr peuple art*
saving their mone\ ftn tlte atiiaclion that is to follow,

In Winnipeg a local rtndrt.u, tor had broken jail a day

1 72 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

from Stillwatcr and change cars at St. Paul. Wo left; a
night call with the hotel proprietor and went to Ix-d
I waked in the morning about fifteen minutes before
train time, ran along the hall where we were quartered,
roused the company and without breakfast, made a dash
for the station, but too late. The next train would get
us into St. Cloud at about the time we should ring up
for the play, with no margin for getting the scenery to
the theatre or making ourselves up for the characters.
The hotel proprietor thought that we mi«/,ht drive across
country in time to get the train scheduled to take us out
of St. Paul But after consulting with the livery-stable
man this was found to be impracticable. The scenery
and baggage had gone on the train.

On a quick decision it was agreed that Sullivan and I
should try the cross-country drive. The stable keeper
sent us a double surrey, with two ordinary-looking horses,
and a boy of fourteen to drive. We started. The boy
handled his team with the knowledge and composure of
a veteran. Sullivan and I complained of tin* slow pace
we were taking. The boy figured that the drive could
be made in time to give us a margin of ten minutes on
the train, somewhat over two hours, as I remember; that
to rush the. horses would be to tire them out and not
make the connection. We thought that more speed
could be safely tried; but the lad insisted that he was
in charge of the expedition and that he would conduct
it to suit himself.

At last on a little lift in the rise of the landscape the
boy, pointing to a distant cloud of smoke, collection of
chimneys and roofs, said: "That is St. Paul."

The horses had increased their speed little if any, but
were now moving with great regularity, and under the

AM'KNTUKMS ON TIIK ROAD I?5

It was impossible fur the people below to distinguish
this figure silhouetted against the lighted hut. curtained
windows. To them it seemed tu he some messenger from
the fugitive' official they were hunting. With the fool-
hardiness of twenty-seven I addressed them as fellow
citizens, lifted my hands lur silence* which came quickly,
then leaned on the rail and spoke its I funded Blame or
Logan would have addressed them.

The ni^ht was cold and clear; the houses opposite
made a line background; it WHS its f*nmf n place for a
political address as a man eould ask for. I luy.an with
a paragraph or two abnut the lights of Knrfisluuen, the
guarantic-s of their KIVH! umuitlrn nuj-.t itution, the
elaboration of that in tiatittinn and piaitii-rs; spoke of
the reason for their enmin^ t«> the Imtel tl«u»is; tt»Id tlu-in
that amon<-4 the rij'Jits n! ever\ hurji'.hmau were those of
self-expression anil the putMiit of happiness; and then
mentioned the Dick'«on Sketch ( lltili phv, inj.* at tltc c»pi*ra-
Iiouse, where the most plra'.wr Itjr tin* h-ast money •• •

Ban^l A shower of Muiwlmlts cini^lit me and my
friends standinj.*; behind am! iuoke a mun!»er t>f windows.
I was drained inside and some man, spc-akinji* more di-
rectly to the facts from the dtu»r hrltnv, finally j*ot them
to believe that the Iieuti-nrtii1-j*t>vent«»r Imtl c-sraped.

The next dav the a|*il*ilit»n in the cnmmimit.v kept up.
1'he people diiln't know the man who had been whipped;
they didn't cure amthmj,* iibmtt that. Their rij'.hls had
heen invaded by nn apixiinted oifieial. The tiling that
impressed me in thrir brlmvinr was tlu- way they went
about their sclf-assrrtion. Itf.teati (»f Iwidj,*, peritvtly
satisfied with getting snmi-thin^ mi the e-ditorial pa^.e in
the public fVjniin signed I»v a I. over of I.iheity, they bad
moved promptly to din-u avti«m. I am not. even at this

to respect the iron bars, had caused him to be Hogged;
and the free Englishmen of that fine little city were, dis-
cussing this punishment. They had finally come to the
conclusion that a man in jail was justified in dismissing
any moral restraint that bars were supposed to imply.
His right to escape was by implication just as inalienable
as his measure of beer by the London quarter guaranteed
by Article XXXV of Magna Carta. The debate of this
flogging order had slowly mounted into indignation, and
finally into something very like rebellion.

As we were ringing up on our first performance the
lieutenant-governor was in the midst of a banquet at
the Windsor Hotel The after-dinner speeches were in-
terrupted by a crowd of Englishmen that was rapidly
gathering outside, looking for his excellency. The hotel
proprietor had been forced to lock his doors, guard his
windows, and finally the lieutenant-governor, after an
hour or two of this menace, was covertly conduct ed out
the back way, in disguise, and spirited oil in a sleigh in
order to save his skin. When we came home from the
theatre the police had to help us to get through the mob,
and we had to be identified before, we could be admitted
to the hotel. The women were frightened; all of tts men
were impressed. But one thing about which we agreed
was that that was the largest audience out there we had
seen for some weeks. Somehow this suggestion caught:
in the tinder of my political recollections and prepara-
tions. When we reached the second story I went out
on a little iron balcony, while Will Smythe and Edgar
Smith stood behind me in the doorway.

ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD 177

A principal member of any "Muldoon's Picnic" com-
pany is the donkey. We found one on a farm, guaran-
teed his full value to his owner, and hired him for the
last half of the week. Our auditorium was reached by a
winding staircase, making an ascent of some thirty feet.
The donkey refused to follow or drive up this, so we
carried him to the parquet and down the side aisle and
up five steps more to the stage. We played "Muldoon's
Picnic" on Thursday evening. All the work I have in-
dicated— writing the play, writing some parts, holding
the rehearsals implied, getting the donkey, getting our
own costumes — was accomplished in thirty-six hours,
during which we had also given one performance of our
original bill. "Muldoon's Picnic," with Bernard's farce,
"His Last Legs," drew enough money for us to get our
railroad fares back to the States and resume our tour
in northern Wisconsin. Sullivan's agony at having to
play Doctor Banks the first half of the evening was as-
suaged and almost compensated by his chance to do
Muldoon, which was really a star part.

There is a comic episode connected with another pres-
entation of "Muldoon's Picnic" by this company. It
occurred in New Orleans. We weren't in the best theatre.
The only piece of local scenery that would serve as the
required picnic-ground was a back drop representing the
Lakes of Killarney. This was very old and wrinkled
and was suspended from the gridiron. To take out the
wrinkles, the carpenters pulled the canvas taut and nailed
its lower batten, or wooden rail, to the stage. David as
Mulcahy had to mount the donkey at the usual moment
in the second act. The New Orleans donkey was not
only sulky but reactionary. He backed up against the
Lakes of Killarney, and — cheered rather than deterred

i76 THE PRINT OF MY RFMFMBRANQ:

date prepared to advocate their methods \vhere there is
a judieial machine capable to redress, but there is line
value in tradition and in its authority with an unmixed

Despite this advertising, our business on the second
night was no better. The local manager thought our
entertainment was not so hilarious as his patrons ex-
pected. He advised a change of bill. We were ready
with "His Last Legs/* and in order to present a full eve-
ning of new offering we decided to try "Muldoon's Pic-
nic," which we had been discussing for some time. Sul-
livan was thoroughly familiar with the play from watch-
ing two or three4 engagements in \\hich Barry and I -'ay
did it for a week each time. I)a\id also had watched
it from the orchestra, and little Delia had played the
child for Barry and Fay when they \\ere in St. Louis.
I had some familiarity with it from having got in occa-
sionally from the box-oiliee.

The plan was to put this on Thursday night. In the
old days, twenty years before the time of which I am
writing, it was not unusual to pitchfork pieces into a
production in that hurried way, and experienced variety
people, even as late as igoo would get together and put
on an afterpiece* with very few rehearsals and relying
more upon tradition than upon script. It was necessary,
however, for us to have a prompt copy, or we thought
it was. Edgar Smith and 1 sat down to tables with pens
and paper, while Sullivan, David, and Delia dictated to
us the play as they remembered it. Smythe, the third
of our scriveners' department, set to work copying parts
for the women. Delia required no part. She was herself
an authority. Smith and I preferred to copy our own,
because that was an excellent method of study. David
and Sullivan knew the play.

ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD i79

fresh telegram came an actor stepped down in character
and read Its contents to the audience— such and such a
vote for Blame, or this or that State indicated for Cleve-
land.

At one point in the burlesque that closed our show
Ned Smith appeared as a spinster of the Dircctoirc
period, poke bonnet and curls. In this costume, toward
10.30 in the evening, he got the laugh of the night by
reading this telegram:

"Us girls seem to have got left at the post. — Belva."

This revives the fact which many, even those rather
well informed politically, never fixed in their minds —
that in that year a woman, Belva A, LockwoocI, ran for
the presidency of the United States as the candidate of
a regular accredited political organization, the Equal
Rights Party.

We had a half-day in the city of Washington in the
early winter of 1885; not playing there, but changing
ears on a jump from Pennsylvania to a Southern town.
It was my first return to the city of magnificent distances
since my term as page-boy fifteen years before. Pennsyl-
vania Avenue looked impressively broad but dcpressingly
shabby, with its little four-story houses, live-story hotels,
and dingy shops, all even smaller than I had remem-
bered. But the line old Capitol stood at the head of the
avenue, inspiring in its grandeur and symmetry, its form
and color and satisfying balance. Neither House of
Congress was in session. I roamed the corridors and
rotundas, renewing youthful impressions, and on the
ramble drifted into the Supreme Court room. I found
that I had insufficiently estimated the impression of the
General Butler rebuke for my boyish caricatures of him,
as I felt a nervous tingling up the spine at sight of the

1 78 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

by this opposition-— bucked through the rotten canvas
ami disappeared in the waters. Nothing during the week
had pleased our audience so much as that vanishing act,
and nothing that could In1 said condemnatory of theatres
in general and donkeys in particular was omitted by
David, whose voice from behind the Killarney Lakes
was Fortunately muflled by the canvas of a reunited Ire-
land and drowned by the screams of the house in front.

One day soon after our return to the States I found
our boys in the smoking-car roaring with delight over a
little comedy in Harper's A/ufj«/i?u'. I joined them and
listened to the smart dialogue of "The Elevator," by
William Dean Howells, That was my first knowledge
of him as a dramatist. The effects that he achieved in
that little play, "The Elevator," and in the others that
followed soon after were very educational suggestions to
a young writer as to what, could be done in the theatre
with restraint joined to precision.

There was a tidy little opera-house in Fort Wayne,
Indiana, fixed in my memory by the clatter of tinware
that began in front of the curtain some time before the
overture and grew to a deafening charivari in a few min-
utes. This noise was a result of the gallery rule in that
house that every boy had to carry with him to his seat
a tin spittoon from a stock piled at the doorway where
he entered.

The eifeet is associated in my mind with election night.
It was from the stage of that little opera-house that we
announced the returns of the presidential election in
1884, as was then the custom in the theatres, and of
course still is. These returns were read during inter-
missions, but as the excitement, mounted the interest in
them more than equalled that in the. play, until as each

ADYKNTURES ON THK UOAD

south upon our route the imTe.iM- «•! th«- i«
colored population liatl \eiv intuit fh»- • ' ^ *
draflsnian Hrrnssm^ his cr.i\mi nuul** ».n I-

carton.

As we got deeper into the M.u'k i»»-h I «-s
understand the authc»rit\ thai oui mmr'?i
had over the boys \\hmn he rn;,;4^r»J !*» i-»-ij»
baggage and do other \\uik lu-tun
when the work was ilune, »»nr "tfr;
of three or four iull-;',tt*wu nrf ;!.•«•-,
violent contest, all the v,hile ^.it»-K

lie was plasinj* upi»n tiu-n ••.«;;,» r.ri!.-
No fuH-l)londed Ai'iii.tn -a»ullt t,l ihr t)
from the fear of a iai>!»it\ juut. '!•» v,.i
face with innhV,n intent i*. t>» put »•',*•: I
that only a .strung vt«nd«.»n jn.ufiu. .».n

of the l'al)i»il's hint hiur.rlt tail lrii:««-,i-

rouge is applied to an Ufttif*-. t.u r .•*-, ;t
the ball of \\hieh tin* lt«i»p( •,««!? lui r. 1
hair brush impnv.i!»iv hi«<,iif. Mien-
foot in Sullivan's inakr»up im\. H,i
darky's susceptibility, he ripiinl i!»r»
as an object of authuutv antl H 111^'. u w ,in4
of the negro psyehcJt^'Y 2>cY>'H({ ihr. In.-,!
stage, Sullivan was in tltr h.-thit »«! ^^mr; s
company and leaving tlm-.c- j»M*ir trH«*»-. u
pressing delusion.

Nothing that I rmi!«l %nv t»* ihr i.huk
found tltis o$tt ahrn-il thi-ii ni»M",M.»ii l!
to devise a \\Iiite %pi:II that ilirv J»«-L«- -,«••!
magically jK»tent.

As far as t!u*v knew ihe puwrr v, a-, n.ia*-
listic words \\iih \\Iiifh I tui-«.n4i*.i»;ir*i !

»-.«•

i8o THE PRINT OF MY RI'IMKMBRANCE

old warrior seated at the table, his chin resting on his
hands and his eyes dosed, while the solicitor-general or
some representative from his oilier addressed the court.
As near as one could gather, shim- with tin- three or
four spectators listening to tiie uninteresting rase, the
issue was a claim against the United States for certain
cotton owned by a loyal eitr/.en awl destroyed us a tac-
tical necessity by some Northern general during the war.
The solicitor for the government, indulging in forensic
elaboration and effects, tired his listeners in the lobby,
who were evidently waiting for Benjamin !•'. Butler to
speak. When the solicitor lim'shed Butler slowly opened
his eyes, turned his head with an inquiring jerk, lifted
his chin as he directed his ga/e to the members of tin;
court, rose with deliberation, and said:

"If it please the court, I have but one point to submit:
If the court overrules me I have nothing further to oiler;
if the court sustains me I have won my case."

And then he submitted his point, a very brief one, too
technical to make an impression on my mind; but the
thing that did strike me was the old gentleman's running
true to form—brief, direct, condensed, significant.

When I was first drawing, my father who taught me
to sharpen a lead-pencil with a penknife and, by the
way, that is an art I should like to describe if .space per-
mitted—inculcated the habit of filling in odd moments,
even those of some preoccupation if one's hand were
free, by making short parallel strokes upon any con-
venient piece of paper, and then later by equal and simi-
lar strokes crossing them at angles. Kaeh new layer of
pencil marks deepened with definite dr-ree the eifeet of
shadow that the earlier marks produced. As we left
Pennsylvania and later left Washington, and then moved

ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD 183

obviously never occurred to them that theatrical ar-
rangements were made in advance, and that we could
not prolong a visit anywhere simply because our hosts
were agreeable.

The sequel, however, almost bore out their innocent
assumption. The Winston militia, the local name of
which I forget, overrode our excuses and explanations
with a disarming hospitality that one doesn't meet north
of that latitude. We were to play the next night in the
town of Salisbury. We couldn't ask the manager there
to release us. We would be under pecuniary obligation
and liability. All of this these young men quickly ac-
cepted, assimilated and transmuted into energy. With
our consent, they got hold of the Salisbury manager;
they arranged, in what manner I do not know — they
hadn't had time to send our next morning's notices — for
his consent to our cutting out his town, and they gave
us, as they had promised, a fine house and a jolly audi-
ence on the second night. They also gave us a supper
and a dance in their armory.

The spirit of entertainment spread through the little
town. The hotel keeper, with a couple of two-horse rigs,
showed us the surrounding country. When, in the glow
of this give and take and quite family intimacy, Mr.
Smythe felt called upon to speak some farewell words
of thanks before the curtain, his enthusiasm outran his
information, and he spoke in most glowing terms of their
wonderful little hotel. A roar of mocking laughter an-
swered him ; even local pride knew this hotel to be rotten ;
and the next morning the hotel proprietor, who — also
knowing his own hotel — could not be convinced that
Smythe's compliments had been sincere, forced an
apology from him by threats of personal violence. We

1 82 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

rubbing them slightly under each eye with a white silk
handkerchief. But as the spell worked and the tears
ran involuntarily from their eyes, they never doubtexl
its efficacy, and I never told them that I had concealed
in the silk handkerchief the white button of a menthol
pencil. Perhaps I should be ashamed to confess it, but
in the interest of efficiency, as well as occasional enter-
tainment, Sullivan and I finally came into a working
agreement by which he covered our local assistants with
the black spell during the time of their required services
and I released them by the white spell before we went
away.

In 1885 every local community in the South had its
military organization of whites, trained to the utmost
efficiency of militia. We met the members of one such
company in the jointly incorporated community of Wins-
ton-Salem, North Carolina. Salem was an old Moravian
settlement of simple dwellings, flanked by its cemetery,
in which this religious sect, consistently with its belief
that death was a democracy in which all were equal,
permits above the graves of its dead only the little uni-
form cubes of stone. Winston, in contrast, is the new
town, with everything therein apparently erected since
the Civil War, and a graveyard in which the most os-
tentatious are welcome.

Our engagement was for one night. The house wan
very thin, but, as the favorable notices say, most ap-
preciative. When the curtain fell two or three young
gentlemen came behind, introduced themselves, expressed
their approval of the plays and apologized for their
townspeople who had not patronized the entertainment;
and then, with a refreshing ignorance of theatrical ar-
rangements, suggested that we stay another night. It

ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD 185

.orther, which corresponds to a Western blizzard. At
he late hour nobody in authority could be found about
he hotel. The two or three half-frozen negro servants
/e were able to arouse brought us a small armful of wet
food. The women members of our company were really
uffering. Miss Page had a singer's sensitiveness to at-
nospheric and temperature changes. We had come to
L pass where it meant not only a temporary incapacity
>f these more delicate ones, Miss Page and Delia, but it
night be a question of serious illness; and a company
itranded a thousand miles from home.

Assigned to rooms according to the apparent impor-
;ance of our members, Edgar Smith had been given a
•oom with an open fireplace. Miss Page and Delia, wear-
ng their street wraps, got into the bed in that room; Ed-
*ar and I sat up fully dressed and wearing our caps and
overcoats. But the blasts of this norther came through
she badly joined windows until the water on the wash-
stand was freezing. The hard wet wood fetched up by
the shivering darky wouldn't ignite. Heroic measures
were necessary. We men took the pine sides and backs
from the drawers of the washstand and the bureau and
the shelves of the wardrobe, broke them up with a dumb-
bell, and kept the fire going. We left the hotel before
dawn, according to railroad requirements, after having
some thin coffee and corn muffins given us in the chill
dining-room. We told the man who came on duty about
our necessity to use the cheap furniture as fuel. We had
probably caused a damage of ten or fifteen dollars.
Whether from indifference or from belief in the justifica-
tion of our emergency measures, the hotel proprietor
never communicated with us about the matter.

We had a wonderful week in the city of Charleston.

1 84 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

left, unanimously admitting that the hotel was fc
hut that we. thought the home folk didn't know it,

My travelling bag with its contents was a stand
joke in our company. It weighed about fifteen pour
One side of it was Tilled with a tightly rolled steamer
and a pair of live-pound iron dumb-bells. The other j
held the usual toilet articles for a night away from 01
trunk. Although we had plenty of exercise on the st
in our rough dances, I was fearful at that time of lo.s
the strength I had acquired in the railroad yard. In
anxiety to avoid that I packed this pair of dumb-Ix
weighing together ten pounds, and I conscientiously u
them every day in the bedroom. The steamer rug, wl:
somebody had given me, I continued to carry beeaus<
its value now and then as protection to little De
There used to be a blacksmith in St. Louis who a
somebody's horseshoes. His attractive advertisem
read:

"No frog, no hoof; no hoof, no horse."
That could have been paraphrased in our organi/.at
by writing:

"No Delia, no 'Editha's Burglar'; no 'Editha's If
glar,' no show."

Except to those acquainted with the country at t
time, it will be a surprise to learn that the most pt
tratmg cold was sometimes in the. Middle South.
people there had not yet recovered from the impover
merit of the Civil War. Many hotels were poorly heal
Railroad cars were often cold. Some junctions at wi
we had to wait had only a frame house, with no fin
the stove. At such times we rolled Delia up in
steamer rug. There was one hotel to which we retur
from the cold theatre in what the local people calle

i87

Burglar this week, I think the St. Louis papers were prob-
ably right."

The hour was late, there had been some alcohol, but
the tears sprang to my eyes as they would come now to
the eyes of RoIIo Peters if John Singer Sargent were to
say to him, "I think the portrait you painted is better
than the one I did."

On our way from Atlanta, which still bitterly remem-
bered Sherman, we passed through Talladega to the
busy little city of Birmingham. A story that Mr. Owens
had told us of a night in Talladega, the beauty of the
town as we saw it, and especially the sight of a razed
gateway to one old estate, impressed me. I laid there
the scenes of the first play that I wrote some six years
later for Mr. A. M. Palmer. Also, I named the play
"Talladega," but Mr. Palmer thought that too exclusive
for the theme, and we agreed upon the title "Alabama."

New Orleans ! Every member of the company had
been looking forward to the visit for different reasons.
To walk around the old town after we had been there a
day or two and located its points of interest was like
hearing my father talk about it as he had talked when
he came back to St. Louis bringing the bananas and
mocking-birds in 1865. The same quaint personages;
the same French market with its early coffee; the ex-
cellent restaurants; the wide-open gambling-houses; the
walled gardens; the graves built above the ground be-
cause excavations of a foot or two developed water; the
beautiful women; the men in broad hats and linen suits;
the descendants of the proud old aristocracy — all were
there.

Our little company put up at Victor's on Bourbon
Street. We ate on the westerly side of the street, where

i86 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

The owner of the theatre where we played was the fine
old actor, John E. Owens, whom I have already men-
tioned, celebrated for his Solon Shingle, Caleb Plummer,
and Doctor Pangloss. He came in to see our performance
on the first night, and every night after that came in to
see only our Burglar sketch; but after the play each night
when we got home to the hotel we found Mr. Owens wait-
ing for us at a table reserved by the chimney corner in
the bar. About the middle of the week Mrs. Owens, who
was an austere lady — I have the impression that she had
been a player too — sent for us. Although she was some-
where near the age of her husband, who was then sixty-
two, her hair was jet black and combed in a heavy fold
on each side, completely hiding her ears after the manner
later popularized by Cleo de Merode. This grande dame
asked for Mr. Smith, for some reason considering him the
chief offender, and while Smythe and I stood by she told
us we should be ashamed of ourselves to keep an old
gentleman like Mr. Owens up at the bar to the small hours
every morning.

She was right. But what eager youngsters in their
middle twenties would have lost the opportunity to sit
with this convivial veteran as he filled the hours with
an uninterrupted series of anecdotes and recollections
of the theatrical experiences so attractive to their fan-
cies?

Toward the end of the week, in one of these sessions,
he asked me, "Are you the Thomas that the St. Louis
papers said played old man Rogers better than I did?"

I told him that I was, but that I had had no part in
the controversy.

He answered: "Neither had I, and I haven't spoken
of it since, But now that I've watched you play the

ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD 189

later arranged for the production of "Editha's Burglar"
by Eddie Sothern in New York at the old Lyceum
Theatre on Fourth Avenue. This chance for the one-
act play in New York and something Mr. Frohman said
made me begin to think of its value as a full evening's
entertainment if elaborated. My leisure time during the
rest of the season was devoted to that work, and before
we closed I had written a four-act drama which was sub-
sequently called "The Burglar."

Among the towns on our way home was Louisville,
where I had a week again with John Macauley, whose
acquaintance I had made so favorably while with the
Norton company. We had many pleasant hours together
and John was compliment arily anxious to have me meet
Colonel Henry Watterson, the editor of the Louisville
Courier- Journal. We called at the editorial room one
afternoon together, and were told that Colonel Watter-
son was at the Pendennis Club. We followed there. As
we entered the large living-room on the ground floor a
handsome, black-haired, soldierly person, apparently in
his middle thirties, was seated at the piano, his shirt
collar unbuttoned and thrown open as by a hero of ro-
mance. He wore a seersucker coat, the sleeves of which
were pushed well up from his turned back shirt-cuffs,
and he was absorbed in playing a medley of operatic arias,
Foster folk-songs, and improvisations.

Macauley stopped me in the doorway. The condi-
tions were not unknown to him. It was Watterson's
frequent practice at that epoch to repair to that room
and that piano and play himself out of some overshadow-
ing perplexity. After Macauley had led me outside of
the clubhouse he explained this and his unwillingness to
intrude upon the mood and its expression. It was not

1 88 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Victor officiated in his own restaurant and brought
the stuiV hot from the grill; \ve lived in a Madame D<
pliine garden on the easterly side, in rooms eaeh letlii
to a common gallery reached by a stairway; each roo
furnished with a window fitted with Venetian blinds at
a swinging door of fixed slats like the summer doors .
an old-time Missouri barroom. The darkies brought \
our black codec in the morning; for lc petit dejeuner i
table1 across the street the coffee was served from a jx
with a straight ebony handle projecting on one side an
an equal spout from a right -angle face.

Two blocks away on Royal Street; one when passin
could locate the gambling rooms by the rattle of the ken
balls in their wooden roller, I liketl keno. It took onl,
ten minutes to wait through a turn, and even in an after
noon of scattered attendance one stood a chance of win
ning sonic four or live dollars by an investment of to
cents.

In our New Orleans week we were all of us so short o
funds that to risk even ten cents seemed dissipation
But partly for the reviving passion, partly for the sak<
of local color, partly wishing to try everything once, 1
went from the theatre one night into the crowded kern:
room on Royal Street with thirty cents as my limit,
picked what looked like a good card, and on the second
roll won eighteen dollars. This was too much of a wind-
fall to be risked at a game of chance, so I cashed in and
carried my winnings back to the company. We stocked
up on a number of needed articles that eighteen dollars
could provide.

During this engagement in New Orleans, Charles Froh-
man, then an advance agent ahead of some Madison
Square company, came in to see the performance, and

XI
JOt'RN'M isM IX ST. 11)1 IS

Wiit'ii \.«ujuvr im n Li\r ;i%ird me vthat t«» <}<* to fit
theWM Kr- !•» MI ^ ,'h'V. I have ad\r>rd three pia%U!ts:
litf'%fuiL» ««f f.« I 'l( J*iM j*hr* *, li.ith nn ihr \ta",e and

II uuti«* •»/; in IT/ ., i «**J . 1 !H" In* ! !*A*I t m> iijia! inns

puifii < ti ' * i i \ i .« ., .iu* ln4 inuMlu '.*! ii:
|nr a pJ-i* '*^'l«.' i * *t* al^'j^.l al\»- a< % a Jir-t par.«* s.l«»iv in
U iirv-papfj ««'i^t. {Ir a! .»> li.ttn*. ili.il* »/!?c4 lima lus
int«-r. irw, ai.«i i.r Ii.n:*. i h.uai *ri -*!i a i». ii^. in hi:i daily

\\ i»! *,„

N««!4.r M| J.r-f i ^ *,; !f! .if jmti% ho^rvrr, inHiu*iu.*t*<i nu*
in the /nu*.' •' M! i ti« » ,, ^l.i n I liiiiml njvsfl! out o! a jt»h
and in <*r'<? •.«! in " t. i,t*ui%, I \vas looking fur work,
and I l«»*»Kt «i ! , ** ai^.«»t r 4 ihr m< n 1 Lmnv, M. A. I;an-
nin>.', a n*:.i.n r n:.iir it \\iiii.nn M.'iiinn Krrdv, itncl
laii r M*tif*!,i%; ,*^»! .f1, i .rj nt li^jiliii^* Totu J«»!uiM*n ul
(iliirliud» » a*. !* i .1 It s* v,rrL'* in lis.it Miuntirr artinji;
a%iit«, r L* j »»t !'.»• *•* l.'Hii-* I*«ia-/)r4|nif« A. Mike anil
I v«nr llii ilif !' • » >\ t,i d .uiiujiri 'j-.aiilt n ar< jiiaiiitanrc'S.
I!r !!*t.i4f ! f I i*» : k * »* ; hr kurv, I t'uuld ilia\r, a Iilllr.

1 Ir « *<!ci ! * if* :/ MM. .jr, ihr man.!, in,; rdilur uf the
papn, ^nl i r i J*j i .1! * 44! nf, -Ir.e <li*!Iar a \\rc-k, which
vui«, fi\e !*«^ii thai I i ! ! haM- duiu- i>\ JMIJU^ Lmck to
"** I«r\.»4i*ir 1 t« -^ it a. a viup«-ap aiu! \vrnt to

ipo THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

until four years later that I met my good friend Mar

, Henry. But that room in the Pendennis and that abilil

| to improvise were to witness and to mark for me a vei

) memorable moment some years later.

| We reached St. Louis deeper than ever in debt, 1

players and printer. Smythe went East to be a manage
Ed Smith went to New York, where as a writer he w*
to win reputation and comfort; Delia became a sta
David a Broadway hit; I was stranded in a St. Lou
summer.

JOt KNALKM IN ST. LOUIS KI;I

fur two \«»U'', ami al ,*» in tht* thratiii'ai Uau-I earlier tio-

scnbrtL 1 h«ni K 4* ant- fumih.tr with the* local mows. It
wa* another nuitt i, howrxcr, t»» trport in tht4 rarly morn-
ing a*; one « »i t hr t» »uv.

\l> hf'4 tlut* *jn tn\ hr»t d.is ami fi»r that mutter
niV fn*»t i! its r'.rts «!.ii tor uiun\ ssrrks ssas tt> cull-
tlrn*.c* itiiu1. I'IM'U ill* lUMinin^ papn . to pata;vkrn|>hs of
liiii|iri u-Liti»n lui «»iii atti i ii'»*»ti I-.MU\ At that time in
St. I oiii » th^ nr,\',;),ij>n piavTii'i' \sa». t«» *u\rr In" rt'icr-
i-iur i»r !n lull n-j»mt <M'i\i!-in that hapj»rnnl in the
cii\t ti«»m a tinniL a%il *!i .'»ji!»-iK l«> a Uinniiif harn in

thr Mli'iiih . lia'lr ;,.», f«.l ihr «,rli^ti\r \\4eili now
ft lit v, c»! in mrtt"p» lii.f i i* »ui lutliMiu aiul lh<'ir was no
tvuU.il PI-/, , .*, ,«-i.i * * i *!' n s. i;.a\ It p;tjHT ua% r\ptTtr<l
In , i I il *«.»< a i'li a^na «1 «n, a nil if p*» . u»Ir l«> j^'t it. cx-
cluJirK. Ihr i<*.»p, .i . »i in.tt v- i » ihfn i'alli'«lfc was
r\ld«!ui'tii .1 j«»»ii .i.il's rliti H ;u \ ami rlilrlpUM*.

A> thi- iiil* irpniiri in *riu,rt n*»t in south, I tircsv
ihr k.implf ^ .'**.»! m«» i t.n1 fi»*l 'i' i^nmrnt1*. My first
nintniM,', at?* i i^i^n i*i*»i;. \\rir usn, v\;r. tl«4volrtl to
a rhi» In, .h»i;, ; 1^4 ..;*!, a i hu kt-n *!i«i\\ ;t% svnult! now
til! \lacii >*n Spj.ur i .ihlt-n, I*ut 'i vnv unpirlontinus
i'ltllfi tiun M! t".i;» a^«l i.f,*- put into a t\\ritl> Jive-foot
\at ahl * loir. I In ?*• -,.4,t 4 in haps t\so hundwt and fifty
laid% in llii% M«I!i-i :i'»n, laii^'jiijt thnnij'ji tin* various
Iiu-rd'. fif*ia B,i..fai* - to Cue Inn (ihina1. an«I thniujrji
tlir saiinii'. ••;>« % iti.ri". tnnu iirw-Iiatchrd chickens to
ioM\iu% milii ti^iiin.ti UToiu-*.

On t hi-. Str- *!.tv »Jt t!*r pouluv sh«)\v no awards bad
\rt hirn ira«!r. A, fai .r. I i»*uhl *.rr, thrir was nothing
to wiiU' aSiMMt hut ju ! i hii Krir, ami fauurp, ssith
ilin^il ttl.i.Lri.. Ou/,»- «i*.. u Inf \\ilh thr a- s^r
attit M-iiuu- h n-\»'I\i;i, i:i tu% iniml an imptilsc to quit

192 THE PRINT OF MY KI'Ali \imt\\c i;

work hoping from day to dm that ** I 'hi- B * f i* " a i
act play I had written, \\ouM tin! a >:<n\' * ( • J >
second play on the stocks whivh I t ti\»l i1 r
dealing with the bi# IVmt^K urli tukt*, l< 4
the Philadelphia Grays, a bnn i1 i^uit !*» , > » ;
fired on the stage, a Jire-rn, i?ti j;,i} j,»
ing tank ear of oil, a runav..i\ fi i*- »»,"
of a rolling mill witli a rctl-hot *.ft « I i.iil
an attic, an abduction, a bank M!I!H 1 1 t :
knives, a picnic by n Jlowi;! IMMM,

hands, a man on horseback \ :ih 1,1!*' ,

fellow in the "Barnaby Uml %r" (ti.»»l,

ruined mill-wheel that titnui! »»\u ,i-

caping villain, plenty of -luti;,, * |5

and several ligltt-comedy t»Mul,t , J

some day, when the HippMiIh.u.r !»,»

house and the United Sttvl lnvi ,..«,,

business, I mean to pnidtiir i?, ('li.ti)i

considered it that summer.
Years later Joseph Brook ,, a!?i i 'MJ. ,

Hur/' also read it,, and saitl: -f IM I « ?f >

God, I can't!1'
But in the summer of iSS-j un

"ThcBurglan" Will Smxihr fj.i.

gkr" with him in New Yuik IK

H. Sothern, wlu> had anothrr rup^

be in St. Louis soun and di^u* -, it „...,

the Post-Dispatch therefore MTIM-.I the

assignment imagiimblr. But r\m ai f- ^ i .,!

daily duties, and there wen- nlii,*i

1 was not a stranger in m<A'.pa:n r oiiu •- \

tcur actor looking for show j.uMilh^ -i- 4 'r c/^' 'Tf

box-office going with visiiinjj a*K iim r ',,,r» T i tl.r , ',,?! ,V,

JOURNALISM IN ST. LOUIS

for the magazines I dropped suddenly back into the rou-
tine of hotels, real estate, justices of the peace, a school
board on its vacation, architecture, and weekly "art
notes.

It was a depressing experience to have the paper come
out day after day with only one's condensations of the
unimportant morning articles; depressing to see the other
fellows with fatter departments grab the first copies that
the office boy distributed as they left the roaring presses,
and scan their stuff ostensibly for errors but really for that
authority which formal type seems to lend to gelatinous
contributions, giving a satisfaction not unlike the sculp-
tor's joy as the disappearing piece-mould reveals his per-
manent bronze.

The first important assignment alone grew out of a
morning paragraph relating an inquiry at police head-
quarters concerning a young girl who had been absent
from her mother's home for forty-eight hours. Was it
to be rewritten or to be reprinted as it was, a simple
emanation from police headquarters? It was impossible
to condense it. City Editor Magner said:

"Colonel Thomas, the reason that item is so brief is
that it came into that morning newspaper office too late
to be expanded or inquired into. It is now your pleasant
duty to discover that young lady and her family and
write an extended report of the case."

I went immediately to the girFs home, a rear apart-
ment well out on Cass Avenue, one of the poorer quar-
ters of the city, where I found the anxious mother, her
eyes red from weeping, confined to the little apartment
by her domestic duties. She confirmed the item, an-
swered my questions, gave me a photograph of the girl.
Beyond this there was nothing upon which to proceed.

i94 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

the business, and feeling strange at any kind of writing
except dialogue, I hit upon what I thought was the out-
rageous notion of interviewing a young cockerel from
Belleville, and letting him talk of the exhibition. I
turned in several pages of this kind of copy with a feel-
ing of defiance. My astonishment can be imagined when
I found that the report was considered a hit. The acting
city editor read it aloud to men at the near-by desks,
who laughed at it in chorus and regarded me esti-
matingly.

I was conducted into the art department and intro-
duced to a German draftsman by the name of Steitz,
who was instructed to make illustrations for the chicken
interview under my direction. Irvin Cobb just back
from Flanders with a portfolio of special stuff probably
didn't make any relatively greater sensation than this
first article of mine turned in at the Post-Dispatch; and
to my mind there was a distinction about the issue of
the paper that afternoon that I had never seen before.
I carried extra copies home to my family. I reread the
article with detached astonishment. The only reaction
I didn't include was a lecture tour.

There is an introductory line in a book called "The
New Hyperion," written in the early 'yo's by a Phila-
delphia newspaper man, I think named Strahan. It was
his second book, and it began with this phrase that has
stuck in my memory: "The man who hits one success
by accident is always trying to hit another by prepara-
tion." That fully expresses my condition thereafter. I
wanted with careful intent to repeat a performance which
was the outcome of a rebellious explosion. Other as-
signments on subsequent days, however, did not lend
themselves to dramatic dialogue, and from a candidate

JOI KV\I I'M IN ST. 1.01 IS u>7

make Oi> IiJX'lt, Ilur urir «»nlv lvu» ni ihicc of the

ten or tsuN« ' * il i • 'i !iil in the tnuin-,.

""Well/" VHd M,l, . ri.

"I found hn."

He allied init* the nr\t jnum, "Hey, Moun\ Thomas
has fouiul lhal KriK ;'itir* The cdilur joined

us.

"Whezr tli*l M»u liPtl hn ?"
"On a (*a.'* \%<-p!ir -.tirri ^ar/f
"Whnr i. -.!»' n..v, ?*$
"At hftnr."

"How did «J;r ,.i| thnr?"

"1 t»tik Inr t'M :*•/'

With ii !»*uK i*l if, »i-t, M.i/iu-r turnrtl }»ark to his
corner-
Moore \Vrnt II t i li», I" *!!!.

"What shall I vi ii i ,t!>Mui it/" t .i',ki-«f.

Manner sai«l: S<N»4 a «!;iinit thn:/t! lint who ever
told you that \»*u Iirimi^n! in li^i^ neur^paper husx~
ness?"

Out on thr th'.riTfii iidilr hf-rArrii the flistUr* of the

peace I tnrt HM * If l!i*L t «*ia i*t t*i<i irpuiic-i ., uho luicl
rather taken inr i*j.ii«i in * vai*;*, in thr oUuv. Bicycle

Hicks wa% M* lallrd hn.t » ,r Iir V, as r*nr til thr fr\v IUC*n
in tlu* cilv aitil thr «»M!* **nr un a nrvi'.papt-t uht> pos-
sessed a !m\«!f% vj * h at that time* v\a** a in1** hinr \\ith
it Iront \\hrrl M\U tut he- in ili4!iir!rt and a \{*<f artliiart
spine that tun ti« :r iS-i -adillr a!*o\e thr lti;s u ht*c*I to
a little tiailer v*h««l I'fHrtf, prihap-. a ft*»*l hi; h. Ilis
<iepartinent tta% thuniu and thr 'tnili/i-d e«I^*cs of
Uthlvtics. Aninn,; n,\ ni.tlc' ;u quaintaiu r% he \\ as the
original \\ oman %»;tli,i, ] .1, jn* Jiiiiiiiuiu',!, and anti-ci^ar-
cltc advocate; a '.lailu^,, ioj,enuuu:» enthusiaf»l. When

i96 THE PRINT OF MY RHMKMBRAXCR

The girl's intimate friend* uric* m-ar at hand and h,
all been seen. There was no \H*;JV, man in the case,
far as mother or friends knew. I here \\as at home i
particular disappointment tut t her than the daily ^rit
of poverty.

I started walking clown Ca^ Avenue in the direetinn
the nearest police station, \\hieh wa-» to he inv next ea
It was about ten o'clock oi a Minnm-i woinu,\ /\ <.Jjnj
street-car with two lu/.y hop*rs jif , T»d p r,t mr, j.»«»ing
the same direction, the eomlmt»»t luIliM,', <w the IUH
rail Seated in the car were two Ian h«n, - iiKt the on
passengers. As 1 caught theii e\pn -.iitu I '-milrtl in t!
involuntary human ri\sjn>nse that i'. juth i;r. -.till a tru
with youngish people*. Then Muurthi:. •, tamiltar in tl
face of one of the girls iixed my att»'Mtinn ntuf hooked u
with the photograph I had in m\ p*H'ket»

I ran after the car and hoarded it. The girls ^re-
serious with resentment of this preuvduie, \vhieh senue
more than they had invited. 1 addressed the une in p;t
ticular: "Is your name Mamie KrIIv?" and sa\v at om
by the expression of both nirls that 1 had futnu! ihe mi-
sing daughter. I sat down, told Mamie of her mother
unhappincss, of the police hunt fur her, the iiem in t!i
morning paper. The girl was contrite for her truane
and immediately ready to }ito lumu\

The car was stopped, we took one in the opposite d
rection, and a few minutes later I turned Mamie Kell
over to her mother, who wrung my hand and patted in
shoulders with the inart.ieula.te gratitude of a n-seue
animal I stayed long enough to Ki-t the j*ir!\ st.^
which was one of a simple temporary revolt against th
hard conditions of a monotonous life. I returned to th
office, a fortunate fulWiedged detective journalist, t

JOl H\\l i*Al I\ M.

jf persMo! '" ^J!t
nati\e tii.it Mi. J*

lied its manU i* tue
but a% I vn-2 ! IJli *J
me that nc.."^^ *
in the wanuhu ! ,i
minmity artl th,-t
imiuj;urite in on*»
the nett'»paprt , r '
quently ri*'.tt i * * -T
Our nilr on tha:
the pie-cut NC*A \
be piintcd telf*i • -
national it v

kill |H< ii MI-!. 1 irh t! • t? ii

iiirtL;^/ liijiiihl ,ijiii!* jii'.li
j » i \* f .i\ f o * I *«M hi* Mil*;* 4 t»,

M**; v. KM , M to inttt l:«i at < \tirwrs
of IH w % ujc in *i MIV iinnlrti
,i %\ ft f! r i !,!« i;ii JM * \\ Lit h th« \
*.* h r. r »>T: t .! <i , o pu 1 tualfct'
M: !% i a ,ti, . 41! ji^i.lu it * l»at tic-

r -.! i » I1,,* ' i i jia,irt, lS;r patent t*f

s ». Hi/,',:, -1 ,i t!i>it itn*!anM( \\a% to

i i * *;,,n-r; f i j>f uj»* »a an\ ii4:iii9 »

.'it »4 l i » !'C I I* »! i »»*! J*' pUf j»« » -f% Ul'

others i'*c\ It v**.M i»r »i«i!.v ^lt t*\f i»;lt'i t«» il<*nv

the WiMlnm of flu ir j;1, '.«:»,»*! • «i !rjr l',.1;«r ot d ,

One <la\ a dr p *' •?' "t t M nr.,t*i 1*1 iKr nnMiirtn tli tiu t
of the i-iu, M-ll ;MT I*:**! ti.at ihr fulNtc life hrftl
nothinji I »*ttrt l««i I- M ll* m lit tl M. 1 «.ul» \u, n.t, kilfnl
his wife* anol tiiuj i\j!»'irn and then '.hot I.iur.rlt. I la*
scene \\^ thirr n,l!f. a^ax, and thr hour v. a-* nraiK
three in thr atln? -i.,i. In ihcnikrU h.u l> that |jillo\\f(l
us over that tit- lam r »»l luitnl uiav.niain «lu 4 and ohliqnc
hurdles t*i *4irc"f i ai li.ii^ JiJ*nn\ Jrnuiius, tl r (,rnior
of our t'.iiitip, a :f ..»•'! fs> «.uh man hi' piopn drjiait-
ment, such a* c.iu-r ot !J*r i iii4ii% th-iiiutioa oi ,i rnc.
neif^hbop* and (OII.J.MCMT^ polu-r and t'»«2onn. 1 tlif-u
neighbors ami lojnmrrt. I a* It !«';*Mitri, *t'» br JM»I hr«
informal ion, htmtro1 a n< .»,i !*\ trhphour and talLiil hi'*
stuff to u irla\ man in thi I'!:.M*, Ii v,as rMitin^ at the
time, but m\ tulla*»MM'-! *.p thr t,j} < r end *Aa-. a mattcr-
of-fuct pei?»uii \%ith a pa r.'»««n !*»i <\ti;ut*i. Ami ulu*n

igS THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANC

I last heard from him he was editing the Army an
Journal.

At the street meeting I speak of I asked Bicycl
what had been wrong with my report; what it w
the newspaper had expected me to do with that L
He said he didn't know, but thought it was sor
extraordinary that would have furnished the pap
exclusive and worth-while news. He then told
an indicative incident, of a reporter who had been
commended for having carried the body of a de*
which he found on a deserted street into a near-by
building, so that after writing understandingly con
the inquiry which the disappearance of this ma
sioned he was able as a representative of his papei
to reason out and discover the hiding-place of th<
and to clear up the mystery which he had created,

Hicks told me also of another enterprising r<
who had obtained indirectly the stolen minute-b
a St. Louis grand jury that was investigating som
ical bribery cases and had then carried these b<
a near-by town in the State of Illinois outside th
diction of the court to which they appertained, ar
this safe retreat had sent in daily installments tran
from their records, to the great embarrassment
machinery of justice, but to the renown of the p
which the reporter was attached.

Thomas Jefferson, writing from Paris to Mr. I
Carrington in 1787, said: "Were it left to me to
whether we should have a government without
papers, or newspapers without a government, I
not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

It seemed to me that to take the stolen recor
grand jury and print them defiantly was a practice

JOl'KNAI NM IN ST. 1OI1S

earned this »U'lih r» Mt. Pahrr*, and il \* as put on
ahead of " \»i* t Ja% k." 1 tn r;ud a imalu ot littvdol-
lars a \urk toi if t''« M f *«f that sra .on, and v In n "Atutt
Jack1' Nent «»n t! r Nsid fin **»!! v«in',» M*ai Mi. Jnr Ha-
worth pi 'i \ ft I Mt, Ban *, i«'.i«i*''', fUtf iti un utit uti-iaiMT,
Mr. !iau'Mr<«j«' a! * }*' r rtl if ra \umit\tllr, \\hru- -»uc-
cessivrl) hi'» *'»• •. I '«»i*.rl attd .Luk^ r:u It niadt* his fn%t
appeaiatu^r in lk« t5i»atn- in HIM t*! it* nitPni paits. I
shoultl inu/^ !% < 'f *» tti* ii^\ iniipi, liMMi it at tlu i-t*
thousand dnl!ai'. ( )! i**»,i .r ihr adapt, i!*il:t\ «»t tlu* mil-
toriaU t«» th* it n1,^' fu** dinai.d. inn 4 h< I ikrn into
OJnsidfiatioi^ !«ut ikr nu tdnn i*. an i \;iirpi« «>} tlu* dis-
parity Ix't^eru tltr i i»!\ pfkimiti\ jr'Aaid'. in llir I\%D
prolfSMnn* .

IHuived to i!itH»'i\ Ii^mr^c'!, i»«-t'..rrn tlic- mvaltifs for
"A Man t*t li.r U^'ild^ and thr thin,". 1 Iraiiird as ii
reporter I'd p'^irptl, l.ilr thf tiainiis . !'«» \\ttiv of
the event*: of ir!f H*-! ill that tiainin,1 u*ri!d ill! a |j«M)k.
Thisarthlr HUT *:-! tnr+i idr»jtils ihcia, \n i ibllrtalif »u
exists, liu\vr\n, t«i tr!l *!rail* MH h r\pnitiuv. as put
prrninnnit dmt. ii^»« tus ani«ulatin** tnrntalil\. llirse
cxperieuiT'. tall ia««,id!\ in!*» tv-u dc^iailinriits: The
teehnie ol th»4 ^aiur .u»d liir Lu idrnls il di-all \\ith the
first eentialt thr vrmnd «'n\ ijunuic-ntal. 1 don't think
the /'V\t-/)i\|«ifiii inatfi* that o'.trntatiuns rliiin to }«oot!
linglish that thr ^tm tindn (Italic*. Dana vu*r. supposed
to make, hut it- rth'tir v*rn- nha-atrd and t \artin;1, men.
A reporter M»*»n qui! ^iilinf: *'thosr hind," and ht% nh-
jeetive e;t«.rs /i.tdi all*, u ade Ir-Af-r and h*ss atnhitioiis
trirs at thr *uthr' j ;t 1 don't !r'nrnil»ri so miifh iuss
over split iniinhir.rs a* some nou\,c"iu\ purists make.
Maybe tnir etlitoi . had *«iui«'.shat of that drrper culture
which made the hitr liioinas K. Lounsbury of Yale and

200 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

I read the finished and as -envied and punted product
an hour later tin- whole Ua e/a, as lai a-; I was con-
cerned, was a disappointment ami a ua.tr <»t material.

That incident lelates immedialt K to the lesson one
learns earlv on a news-paper that all material -must
adapt itself to the lunirly chaiij-.es In the paper's require-
ments'. Oscar Wilde, hiring asked slightly to shorten
"Ladv Windermerc's Fan," siidied as lie took his blue
crayon to comply, M\\ho am I to tiille with ;i classic?1'
Hut lor the newspaper, classir, epie, am! r/Jt/-</VuiTt'
\vatcli their step, move up in hunt or change cars at corn-
mand of city editor and make-up man,

One other thin1/, 1 learned was that mateiial ^nnl else-
where mij»ht never !>e uf value on the paper. In addi-
tion, to the daily work expected of eaeh man certain of us
were supposed to turn in what wa-. called a special ioi
the weekly edition, an elaboiated and extended write-
up of some department, or rt«m and thru a in*»rt* h'unk
attempt at iiction. One suelt contiibutinn ot ininr wa*
a little dramatic sketch called "A Man of the World/'
Manner latched at the form, and the sketch did not ap-
pear in the paper. Months afterward, when (leor^t
Johns, during Mar,nrr*s varatinn, was af.ain aetin;; clly
editor, lie <Iuj; this sketch from a drawer uf dusty dis-
cards and returned it to me, saying he thuu^ht it loo gmic
to be lost.

In iHqo Mr. A. M. Palmer, at the Madison Squan
llicatrc» produced a short ct.»metly called **Aunt Jack/
in which the principal meml«'rs of liis eompanv, includ
ing Agnes Houth and James H. Stndtlart, were appear
ing. Maurice Barry more, on the salary list, was, how
ever, out of tins bilk After two or three curtain-raiser
had been submitted to him awl fount! unsalislactury, h

J()t H\ \1 1SM IN ST. UH IS 20 j

crippln! our •/.:<" "' !:•;», '"in ,in,i !,,, 'liiis -dilution,
as is nut miu . j. . :.'. •. 1 i <• « .f »'. l-.i.' i«i«" .»unl a i-umpuj-

cn-ascd wtrl!»«.t".il -•• •' ' • •'• •' n,c.,T,i! ..iljH-l :uul !•»•-
toury attack <•! CMT. 5 :« ' am, ,in«l <,anu(i^ a tutu'h nf
acid! Hut tU i!. • "' .1- l_ k.iutri:.'-nf- ijiulitir. wm-
sulvfil ttv a tu'.«' i.t • ' t <" "*.'-( ti..p>''i.

1 can -;IT M.» «'» ! <"' " ••'• '•• -lt ^"- >!< '•»•- »» ^-^ t-L.m,l-

i , ,, | 1, fl „«»•.»> >*!,*, '•I* ln»l«»«lit»l\f'filLf<»f

story 1'iMiiu, li «»r,» v. f .4 , t ...« i ,\ *,i**. »A , i »UM u i»a \UIIKI i
Street and ai!",-, Ii I: « * \ * Ir i»l tlir ti!,j!u! Opna
House, turnij',/, in !/ . • ,*<i-l thaii !-t ^itir pninlrt! in-

hand, by whuh i«.r i ^ -» ••• ^^ ;f, -i»i ! hi- ^ilt >;r.tmc
as \\ith the- sa'i-r K-i'. ;- I «" *»» '*' ^!ri? ^ !* ^;''!l p^nip.uiour

that looked l;i.r t iH', n^ "i t% 4 , ,'IMP.

The de-.k that I % •'* t • a N«MI « i n:»»ir v as imme-
diately brhiml thi. '.-^.t-J iha;jt an1 ia» nl llir mii!»l|e
window loi nriibri u- r.^'i a i*»M-tf«J !»u.t!;*tn. In
Ma^nor's hit «»i. t1 <• i' ,M .*t,, !rJ -all ^as Ntii.r 1 ,4iu%

our

a.i ai-r

sensible to ap^n* ,*? r ! A4l5» «t >HMI ifa pn I Itn «\!,i^-
ner's upiniMii.. 1 n. u! .1 M»! ,<r,« uhiili }(i.«-. a tuurh
of biith inrii. I a*»r hail * I put a !» an h t»l u»ps on Maj*-
ner's desk,

He said: "'!!<?«'• ?' it '.t>iJl. Jo!m. 1 t!t«n't think
much of ii mvf!:, ,12 »i I i!' nt l«!ir^t- thai 1 am ttiilinj':
as \vell us ! tli*l l^n %«* n a,, *

Manner mailr a,; tn,:.i*» . tf, ili'pliv of thr rvii.iMii*;
that he immt-d;.*:* U hr, .,-; ,i , hr I»»»i»!K an -wir*!: "Oh,
yes, Mikf% \on d«*! N»» ; k'.n!r iu I a-. v,r!I as \«»t» rvrr
did. But s..ui I- Tr i", i-.ipni^ in, /' an«l t*;»n ihr blur
pencil slasho! oil a;.«.:!ai hall -p i/r brf«ur iir quickly
swung in 1111%

202

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

the American Academy defend the divided infinitive
only as scholarly and time honored, hut as often the n
expressive form.

We reporters also learned a concentration of at ten
which gradually euhned down i'rum fren/icd resistant-
a self-respecting exclusion. The typewriters that tr
such a bedlam of modem others were m»t thru instal
But as the hour approached tlie make-up tlie nisi
the odice was the same as the modern rush: hoys ca!
for copy; men from the current sensations arriving i
their verbal condensations to tin* cilv editor; shm
consultations; and perhaps an«»ther element in
smaller city that may not he present now tlie inva
of the room by men who mij'Jit he a Heeled by the i
calling to secure its inodiliealinn or Mipprrssitm; t
and the doxen other eonfusi*»ns all were ihnv, sur
around the reporter who \\as to have them accelt
rather than retard his part of •,**me iep«ut that he
scratching on the cheap print paper. MOH* than <
since then at a dress rehearsal and its attendant hn!
! have been thankful for such of that uatintl a i was;
acquired, which has helpetl me to sit at a musie-s1
in the orchestra pit and pateh up smm* limping seer

Let me tell of certain inilueneinj* eontemporarie
the Post-Dispatch. Allhtni}.;h it is preferable lo tie
character from revealing ineitlents, just us it is ami
to infer the outline of the lady on the barn door frou
scars made by the knife-thrower, some faels coiicrr
our regular city editor, John Manner* cannot pos
be inferred and should therefore in* told, because a
editor more than any oilier man on it paper delern
the relation of a new repo.rter to his business.

Some congenital or youthful calamity hud s

jot it\\i ISM i\ sr. i en is

fm!h*l IK.

tint* * t tit* /* "* /*; .;»•'*' ', 4 MI ^ s , t»{ n-j » a t» ' -, * «»nu' tin* c
ii* }«*::! a/*" i ! *,r i . I h<* pn tj;n:« nt t !i j j iti^n u! ihr urn-
\r!u','?»» -> i! <* f| *<<a ii in r IM'M! Ja.ia . II. « i nnaa,
V, a - rtfi . < <! a. * »! ' < *fl «>f t!.r » * M * .M , i! i*» 111' !i' rM-
l»IaH4r ! » ai a?rau d ihraln* ii iMir*l *»t ntiiir ill St.
1 it;i * ." ' » T : ii. 'i / I l* i! ,i ]n i MM In* n\ it > i»»th niif hi

f 1 1 l ; ! , "!

* Ii , r tn ,

kj>n\\ U Vi L

j*, ir I :! ;i
rv .,• / * J

|!lr j r-» ;,

allc- ft! , • ':i,!j f! 1 1 », M ,•• t1 , .! v .1 , i L!J. •*! *n , U i.tusr
H»»iiJlr*t> 4, l j*j. ir, / i' t:'M f! i if f jniinnriif f had iur-

M*^ I1 r
f ur.

1 Li .
l if i\ r *

>i . n! l.il?l !M V, ;!t M ' ' rt l! till' St. L

,i |»^ ' » i.r *« i i i ),«:' It^'ii1* * » uf a wrll-

*!«' «• • n * » t . M'.J> ," , nil \ r,f Mf t*rt, a lit I

"i :?.K! •'! M « « » • ". II, -«i • cntrrjui-*
* I l .4- » '" • M << «:i .i t » 1,1s . ,. 1 :; !>uf \.hrn

' - .,! f :' - .<i If t K, f J 4,i 1 >«M C lit'.,

*'. I, r. If W,i'. ll"}M !* . MM tl\ t*
r til t'jr ti.i< «i » finl Ic.itW*", ol I III*

.*,,», inrria * n ic-
{ i*n a 4 j M/r* la fl
*rra i h u1 ••'!» the4 i'

fun

aT lli

cfjMU r v,.r, a / ^

vJiif r tirr ! t'.iiiN

in iii"4i

i' ''•-! tin >t.li%i luil <!.-,!. . I Irlt

. I !•»* ll^HiHi I* ! HI , Il4«! 1 1! « »/J ^'/.Tf I

tn»b!i!r ! •» altnuir\ .rr.naL ( hir
.^:f ! . tl r aaiar nl Nat Dmlrn,
*!'/ : i l."l tanlf liiin a taxuiilt*
l> r\n> nr/'ia|»«i « i:ar in thr Statr, Hrpfr rn-

204 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

I was bending over my own work, naturally amuse
but I had not laughed aloud. His attention had be
prompted solely by accurate suspicion, and here is ]
speech to me— I give it because it contains an expressi
which has multiplied more prolifically than the Bibli<
grain of mustard-seed:

"Colonel Thomas" — Magner always conferred a mi
tary title on a prospective target — "Colonel Thorn;
you have a very sensitive dial. Sometimes you smi
sometimes you lift your eyebrows, sometimes you or
shift your wrinkles. But you always register/*

The chorus in that quadrangle of desks gave him t
response he had played for. But his dial illustration i
pressed me, and the word " register " was indelible.

In 1891 at the rehearsals of " Alabama " at the Ma<
son Square Theatre, and with Magner vaguely in mir
I found myself using "register" to the members of IV
Palmer's company, whom Mr. Eugene Prestrey, the sta
manager, was rehearsing, with occasional conferenc
with me. Presbrey consciously or unconsciously adopt
and worked the word until it became a matter of pla
ful comment with the people he rehearsed then and aft<
ward. It was repeated by him and others more and me
frequently through the years, until now that it has e
tirely saturated the nomenclature of the movies bo
seriously and in burlesque I am wondering if its inund;
ing start was not back at that rivulet from the corner de
in the old Post-Dispatch rooms on Market Street

Except for the anodyne of intervening years it wot
be depressing to go on recording one's repeated failuj
to measure up to editorial expectations. But at the e
pense of my vanity I must tell of my first political cc
vention and therein of two ineptitudes, or, in mode

XII
'I\\0 111 H/KK I1 \PKUS

In ;d! t1 «- .«4 tijrr . 4 .'i ,'4!?:-! ,1 i!.r -,e tlu!:r, I never quite
l< t **, :f 'i1 i!ir* »'MM*: * d rijr, v,e. Vw iiuif might
btrv v, .i,i -it /v i!,- *! " IV B , ,'n * in Ne,v York.

tl * rr ,' • ^ :. »-i f'l- tiii^l O^iia lluti^e, \ulh

( «r< !^* \t* M l»* .' *l lf . < ,',*r ,i!l«i J«*liM \Mi|u!l nil

Our ^rrl \t.i», \° (**i "*: i ,iM f% thfir alfei iier trium-
phant \ t'..t ! < I i . f '^!, *'!,«• l»i» ».:r lit u 4ih hei a c**i

J*t !\*jf !i ! Jf rn fir i-Vff fi» !%f pit M at Sir Jf, I ulllf4'

rif'.tai. \Ls,i ,/* ft,1? .! f'j^rp!,-, }*4il Iirr-n in St.
itiiif hri l,i ' tj*j"*»ff;tt <i-Mpani» h,t«i hei*n ffiiit cif
JiifilHH »\i*f* **!, li**4f*f! betufe fu\ liinr a*, lir. li%!iclifig
ju\ri»ilr. 1 hrrr weir %f*!I f h^t;- ,tii«!', o! pruplr ill the

hivl ihr 4 Mil iin 'jhi iijitd! the hi <l ni/jit fioin that

A% ihr .i»Jrf 1. 1. :r !,!*»-, I f> i be* I \VU\ ^a, to ^o to the
Mlpel i ap!4J%t j 4't f !<r h r liit- i<l\ ;il(ic'r<i upun t<> a supef
^iii» v,tjul f Iff j,,r i 1^4 L; , pKue, ami -il*«o pav, a small
lip to ihr captain hi:. . !j \! iht pi«*pri lime I found

206 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

tatives of these newspapers sat about the tables, wl
we were some thirty in number. Our private tally
the roll call in strokes of five like little garden gates 1
us the ballot before the clerk was ready officially to
nounce it. It was undecisive. The newspaper men M
anxious for the outcome.

In the interim occasioned by the count I was consci
of no impropriety in getting up and saying to the c
vention that they would be called upon to vote agair
a few minutes, and that the entire press of the State ^
in favor of Nat Dryden. As the entire press of the Si
had been somewhat critical of all of these small politici
now convened, my statement was not helpful, nor wa
in order, as the pounding gavel of the smooth-faced ]
Hagerman informed me.

This oratorical ebullition, coupled with the substitu
picture, decided the man in control of our staff. W.
the next bundle of longhand copy went east to St. Lc
I carried it, and resumed my patrol among the real-est
offices, the school board, the empty studios, and ti
hopes of a call from the New York play market.

l\Ut HI 1 f/Ht I'API'KS

"\S!h. i i1
tht *,? .1 '"

i ,

HI in UMlftil I!! \,1»« > JU t Li >

;n i, "( ii * f i.il .Shi'itha

tui!it* .i* u T»«
a \\ ••'..* V
"U-* . ^. f§

\\ M ^ 'l' , f ' J ,,

» ' !

i i »,M i i*" t i -

If! lit* t *

\\ Lt * " r I ' 1 a
nn *M«\!t! tV
ii, ^ I uj * \ a i
' - . .« .•: : 1'r,

Dhii firs*

Jl ^M\ » < » ; » , < j •

1 1 if ;u l. i, * :i" : - I i
i »rtf;« t1 »»l :« ,u n

llir ti! ,*r j ;,, tij !l

If ] * „ , I ' I * 1 1 f

i I t * 1,4 ^ i!!» Hi iliin. \\ h\

^ L '*! ! , fi * HA » ! t* *il n , J**
i * I 1. if U1 , ! »« •', ! 1 )t »V It*! \iill

1 M * * i* t ! t i « "• '» »! iii , ii.uul in

• r " 1 "U» h« lilllhr!/1
t r U '.* !» t >?"i « »! 4, ' », vi i! i rii ar*
i 1T f s ! . ? \ t

i i ! f ! * r * ' t , MII tiir paj*rJ

4 •» ' i i7»'l * 5 t « ii* fl 'M il'T lunlli Mafl*

i u .t! it t • »i I t 'I f i,, i 4!*nj!i\ k ami
*>* s n ;! itt' M «4 i fh iiif-fi. Manner
a J' ' f lliu C i !..<I,ui.

, 'r a! l I In v, ,tf p4! lls hri ;w.c

" »»| »• •, tutu, a* 1 Vt f put t*» h^liijli^
[ i, r, %* r,r t t * i J in c.u lit i nape*! . llsr

'\it - » »n !«• %Vi«* H! !»\ i'uitiii;^ tail

!.i3«l» ;iud haw ic-

t Lr V, Ii.Ir pa! i t •

i* *tl ai'inii I* !, *,
H n r t\,n!r l>; a !
ihr r I ,* M n Hi * «r
*I Li- ;ti'i ! *T»rtt i
ilri^ it n{ -, i i ,»iii',

, i .1 f Lillll !fr!cl allfi frt! hv l!ic4 i

!, I hi* putttir. in ihr /N^r Ois

* *f«! ja u f , , ia it • Lihd 'i it"\rr
., 1 *Ju 8f.«r. i tllrtl thr i hall*

2tiB THE PRINT OF MY Itl-Ml Mill! \\( H

myself in a hanlu-tk, a jua «'«:*,
othcrwisr aiT,i\rd as cmc4 »»1 th< ;ti *
tor's Talc/1

Miss Awirr.un'* %Lt/* *f i. « * •
named Munh^tnrn , t»» *, :, '• . I f : -
at Pope's hox-nJiur, and v, : » I i ,
me; hut he did n««t. I v*ti * * * ! * i
rouj'Jwivks some nl t'*"i r i,
aiuv; ami uiu i ^',l« » : ! l i^ * *
had tint ntmrd Lt i rv * :>• * \
hail j-i\ rn ii*r ;ia ,u!:i » f ! , \

illllc'l Nltit' nf !!J\ fl ; , .

Till', vur. a ;••»< *d « V.ii « ' a;i '
lati\ r ct{ a ; it at i!,i i t . , f , ;
U or/</, fc .ud i< j»r< • * i:t .i?i , t .'." \'
cx-siar in di f ui c% ,ird 4 »/' ', .

• • a furat iniii. n \\; ?o f <( t . L
fort > \ i*ar. <»f a, f .si:d «»•**»!.
in}; what ivi< i \; M !r-d f ,| im- , •
the ilvir/, N( 1 -•/' • i t!r. i • , / {

ready im thr • n i»nd ,M T,

Jus! the 11 ( rrnri.i! \\ . .
wavi nn old Jiic-nd ut ti.r i* t

hands, nml the* ^r^n.J ,\ . j K ^
1 his kind nt } irrti i, »*(a :, ! f r •, t * I ,*
who \vus thru alii, JM ?ti ti. , ,• i

the I'inuh iSruiiiir a pian ,t ,
tlic trntie uf the— fa, r »/rh •. • . i
wait!!!},' \\hisprzrd lu I'TT',- \ , , , 1
travelling with the IUU^M' , m - ,; ,c ti

\J
r?!

i .' •• U ,:-..

i 1

'I\\<> H i II/j'.K PM'Hts

\Vt *!, v Ju-ir f f :

III ihr ..Mri «! I,'*

'i tijthrtiid, IV

quint!

i i* *M ifj^M-., I ? r *,n, hi of

>' J * < j»* i ! * n» i: {, Ji ., a \\ 1 it< I thru fir*
< v * . *' r and v r !*v afrd stutl, and hrld

riiti li*r tit, Kr «i *
} Irflf \ C t »*, ( ,4*!r! «*

W4% |L« a !« 4 ' , *

tii»i*/ v«h / \»f( „,

1 III 4llf , .i s •!• u * i1 '
V«rir, I!*/, p''"",
«!» ? at I* 'i f -M l ? i

. «t t * M- n , j ?*

( fil ffj'* i?ii
I o \, j •»'**',

s \ .' -.< '^

T, C,l'fff.*i
a! r r <!< *

ilh j* „ ( ^illrfufl
fii » ili\ " All )!>{*•

wliiv It U i*
j.tK T% in-
.t rs '* Hi ;

lilt8 M* rn u ti it J!rii 1." \\illi ihr J ,tpi I ill his h;i!!cll
Si iff 1 1 ,M| IV II ! ; !»lti r ill l" r t MM 1 jmrn aiul» ' frikillK
hi' I 1% rf ill l!'f l4« r «ij fir H »*;,'i/' ItiUllfic* III, if! at till*
J«y«»itr |- ' t-'ii'lr, «ir:»»\ tnt t'-r vJ^lr lr| ,< *!|MI ii! llihc%
ttLilrC »ii!i! -v lliff/. /T*, Viitlri, \\»i * iirl\ %rltlrtl aiming
flu ',t*f « I il j-,

Hut f' r %»i*', V* 'L 1I*?,M * f" lilt IlJiu* hrfil ftif ttif
f ii h *!»i* ,!'; i "iif"' i |j»i^ *rfifhiu' ih" r i«»niir frjinil%»
Hi hril \Lu4fl! »f,4* '* u;,a^r; pia: r 1:1 "Ihr MaihK*
ifr4!l**)ll l!if I Ml* \s r'jUr 1 } r,l! I r, and a Irf f r£ to inr
ll« in \\ ill !ni ", l!,r i*I lh.it hi* ua * i *iir4iirnisf4 thr u«l'
\J'a!«iht', <»! I'**! Ait'l( that <haira ^ilfi "Ihr Iiui»Iaf.*
P.ndinr I !a!!. %!,** 1 ,u! 1'rrn ill thr \"*»lf ii»inj».tUN liiirt*
Mii'U'.rr. i»t!":r »8« ' »jn /. c j>!.r,*il "In < ain}»» aiul luul
In i 4 Irln ,r»l I1 r Hi*! ,* f 4 . * »li I l,i* ' . .iI<fM t Vi ith \\ r «!-
tt»!il .|«it{ IJ! , * J .ti th« M I'tf MlJ Ilnil •- 111 (JIH.t^O,

\\ri% itMtt Tallin,; i'iif.n vithliatMt. \\ilon at the

CjiMiiu in **| i,%;ii.r,* ;»,!.,, !t had ic-uh»d it. thir
drrdlh ntouiiai-* r t*fi Hj**ad\vav.

210 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

plates, which were then used as moulds upon which
stereotype metal, poured hot, hardened into plates that
printed exactly as the ordinary letter type. The method
was hard on the draftsman, because the chalk, which
turned to dust under his strokes, had to be blown away
after each mark in order to let him see the shining metal
of the exposed plate, which after all made a poor con-
trast to the white field.

Both Steitz and I used to look with envy and covetous-
ness at the daily copy of the younger paper owned by
the Pulitzer company, the New York World, which came
to us fresh each morning and was spread on our care-
fully guarded files, generously supplied as each edition
was with illustrations made by photographing the artist's
unimpeded pen work, and having the further advantage
of reduction from large originals, whereas our chalk plates
had to be drawn to the exact size and limits of our
column.

It was the custom of the New York paper at that time
to illustrate its current news with little run-in cuts made
by its admirable autographic process; little outline illus-
trations sometimes taking less than half the width of
the column, but so pat and referable to the text carrying
them that they were a pleasure to the reader. Some-
thing in policy or process has now banished these little
pictures.

In that winter of 1885-1886 there was going on in the
city of New York the trial of General Alexander Shaler,
charged with accepting bribes while a member of the
militia board of New York from the owner of certain
parcels of ground selected as sites for armories. The
New York papers were treating him and his defense with
a levity that made amusing reading even in the Middle

I\\u II i ! l/i it i'U'j Us

I '

» f \ilfi(u B.
! it . n t nlrp! t

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r »• c s ' -If , j-
V>«rk In! tl:r

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a- thr lit: ,i-
hr!;»it{ I1 t* 4^. .
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J« • i{'f t 1 !infa ' I. I •»».; fu \*iu»!U«

*? t'u1 4 J*. IP rtfl» thr f*\|ilr ,% i 41

* r,, ./ l! r 1 II-MI StaliMiu !Ir hail
< » - -Jt hi'* j».iiLifr« P.litil «t j'tun!

i , , I ^'**> I l - t !n rL ,I!H I If"!! IlIIJI l»»

!,• 1 I 3;« ',i t 'i. .liain, ' h.U 1 '.trj»j*« l!

-t .^.i!? I f illL V till a MUU.t.r p.uifti

,,. 1 !'/*ritp'!»sr llu*u.ani.l i!ullair* in

,-:. ,-.»:r III! Mf.r lu ^', ,h J
* »,.!'!*'. U u, hr a *'t I i»« i

20 THE PRINT OF MY RFAtninH \\( :i*

Rosina Vokes, who had Irft 1 i«d ! * t^j,- ! ' , ti',» j,t uf
that same piece while sfu* van! t-» l\v !r !, v< 4> 3)itfv
with her own excellent I'ttu <,«»;, ,u.'.' , j-u i'i " I he
School Mistress" at thr Mandaid IK./ur. " M.jM.hn •;
Picnic/* the comedy twr cun |Uii* *< i I a;»^u ''»tiite ! (MI
performances in Canada ami \ev\ ( )I'IMM . i , i i**^!^^
Tony Pastor's Theatre with Ban*, a-j I la* in l!)iir
proper rules. Salslmr\'* rm*il'.i»!»»"i , .i*ti i vJ \ !• tjr
had modelled our now di,!»iniii*l i ?« i f* ...i. pit *
MThe Humming Bird" at tlu sf.n I u it ,

James O'Neil, with v«h«»m DeM i I . *. » ! i i ».f. !tr
iir.st appearance in M The ( ,r!* * >M?I »i I i /.,*, Ss i-
ning at Buuth's Theatre in \r/- \ < i\ h. , i •*• .| "" \1 •» : •
Cristo/* which was to *ri\e him a a *« r ,,i 4r I *? * ^
twenty years thereafter Su n l*t mi1 i:*!:, -, J , J, i»{
been our Sketefi Club ^mM at t! r p;» ! ,»» , i \ ? ( n *.t,
Ixuiis, was ^iviii|* fur the lu t ti"ji a I », r M ,! y ',» ' ; , h
was to be repeated at tafrnal !.d i* r n-\t , , », , •, r.tt l(
Minnie* Muddern, in \vh«»fa 1 te't n -ur :* r» a t»t .»*^
interest because site had be< n . u h a Li; •• * • .*! I1 ••
llieatre, and because 'I'uui Da * \ ,..!.«» 1 .L ! . j - , t.i'
nersiiip with my lather in NY,. ( h!r r. , •,- ) r, I ; i • , 1,
Ititd subsecjuentlv beenme In i I'f'ti, va (> i "( i

j>riee/f by Howard Ta^Iui, at t!.^ II; » i (>(» • i If , - ,-.

Rolisnn and Oane, Jti< nd ,hi;» v*i:." ,»,!, \ I * i ' ; • *.r,|
in the old arl-)*alleiy da\%» and J;M Li. I J f : , ,, !j t »
inspire me and m\ i-umpaa' or iu • u t' i! * i n-

lures, were plavinj; Biuu M;I U *f,a' i ' i« * ,"
comedy, **The Henric-ita " at U<r I >,,-,'. . .- i ' / i
Will Gillette had quit fu- a,i,% : » ; ! r, , 4i h i*' .^; "
and with "Hi-Id I>v thr i mih\/ t!*r tir : i- ; .„ i n|
the war plays, was rivalling the o>u;aiu., % »lf . nf
Bronson 1 loward.

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, *, Lti M'> a'. $•»»!„ a^t*I«tlll^* aft

*»+j a ,*fff!i4 *in4i l!uil\

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h* »I !? r 1411 thtn

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: i >'ivi ?r« i,,..< , If a!
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f of that
lir.r r\-
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1 wr.!, l'1,^ **, L,*' 1 J 4 , * M M i«« if i • •! I * '«%!*! l»r v.ntlrtl

ill ihr lLaJ ^i I '.» it ; •** > i^ at I v«f f r / J J »r *f *Mft*r!H«lv
rf-r m thai t' r , un ^!"''fi I - \ ! *'*« li/.« thr •aMaH"l«»y

214 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

formance. The motive was to get four thousand dolk
to lift a mortgage his mother had put on her home
start him in the coal business.

Knowing that he would reach this water-tank a]
drop off in the night, his rehearsal was to go over t
route of his escape, about twelve miles of rough count
to the Missouri River, twice — once in the daylight
determine it, and once at night to master its difficult]
under that condition. It was only when later he got
extemporizing that he fell into difficulty and was ca
tured. For a successful run full rehearsals are necessar

Another celebrated case was the murder of an En
lishman named Preller by a fellow Englishman, Maxwe
who needed the money, and who left a trunk containi]
Preller's body with the hotel as security for his boar
bill. I made an incidental use of this in the "Earl
Pawtucket" for Lawrence D'Orsay in 1903.

Other incidents, character bits, and situations in th
newspaper work, too numerous and detached for pn
ent description, helped pack a mental record upon whi<
I drew more or less for some sixty plays, big and little.

Along in this first Post-Dispatch winter came wh
was called the Great Southwestern Railroad strik
handled from the labor end by the consequently notoi
ous Martin Irons. This started over the discharge
one union man. When manifestations at the Missoi:
Pacific yards between Grand and Summit Avenues
St. Louis required a second reporter to help cover the
I was sent to the scene. Among the captains handlii
the labor forces I met two of the old K. C. & N. Railro*
men who had served as junior officers in the Knights
Labor assembly over which I had presided as mast
workman some ten years before. By them I was enabL

TWO IMTir/1'U P\PKUS 217

v, *':!!» 1*< 1j « ^ t'J *it'd ;» a'n \ui;r into the eon-
*»t:!» / >* M **• \L : **! **,r !,if?i in liont of me. It
\\,i, !* M Hi" »'•! ^'Milu mana, in,; editor of the
N«", V •'. U -, ;'. h T,i,I:

O'i i • • „ \ f /'* , r^ *• T, • .-n*'1 K»« r. will fttr t!u* first timt*

•-, i . a *-. ! ltujn«»r*>us writer and
it M' i' r v»: ar t»i ttrscriln* line! illus-
u.i», , • - - " * H > , ' * 'it ,ni"jt!if;t% with l*»ral

i >•* r • , ' • - i ] f J • • % *i *• * i i i niral point, say T<>-

» , 4 /• f • - * j>* »f >«M: 2rj*«»rt<*r will trtrj^ntph

u * '

\\ I 4 M I j 4 i n » .* ,! I f «!,fd i»\i i at Manner, who was

. .. t <i.f 4",* *, , f , f ,,»-il thin PJJ t»» \luort% \vlio stood
1 3f • jt j, r •«„ >? » ,i » j i!t* nr» i"1 1 nn * \j>r <". -aon.

M,..,M . . ,d

f*Jii tf.l.i- , i,»u ! *, I.'*n»oiuu . wtitii or artist.?1*

\\ ? rM 1 * , ; >f I : :ti hi ii-pK lie told me to follow
J _\ , | i:i4 ;', i,v t r, \». hnr the arrangements were

4,(t i%-tr<: || . ,»: » ;,»- IM!I! iii pailia! r\ji!anation thatt
;t,J,M a i'; t • *iiTir{Mp»i v. i i r o »tu i fned, Moore was
I ,, f f - f,"**. •»!» m\ , *1 hi* chance to save the
f. ti ^ I < tf4i\ oj onr man nn this projiosed trip

. } i i * ' t>«»xN ^!' Loiii% in the parlor-car,
Mr-,r..f t !•.. a I;td\ e-iuie from a chair at
,i i »».*- ,r-a>, Sin littlr daughter of five or
,^ v*! * f t^.M- ,'l '/.a anno^in1, UK*. On tht* con-
!!si*r 9 I V(V r , h , 'm- .Nil, ;»'. titr child had said her
|, ?M\.,.r, <•' If.i.M, ^«iiit. HH !ai!\ ht-rsrli' was a sister
t.t Ma a i + . 1, NMV "i tl.it ut\, wlio was a candidate

to voto !ar

2i 6 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

stories of the despised bush-league pitcher called fr<
the big-team bench to save the deciding game of 1
championship series. And, as it is, I'm going to ha
string every dramatic trick in the telling of it. I'm j
ing to draw all the climactic fizz from it now by sayi
to start with that one Saturday afternoon I was the Ic
score man on the local staff of the Post-Dispatch, a
that twelve days later, because a talented and hon
and earnest woman happened also to be vain enough
pretend to a knowledge of elementary Latin which <
didn't have, a committee of politicians and bankers a
otherwise sane citizens were trying to give me in
simple a going newspaper and fifty thousand dollars
cash under the misapprehension that I was responsi
for nearly all the business success of Joseph Pulitzer,
whom I had never spoken.

I have referred to the prominence in the journalis
world at that time of Mr. Joseph Howard, Jr., the N
York feuilletonist . Either Johns or Jennings had ii
generous moment of attempted encouragement m
tioned Howard's name in connection with my own, <
serving of course the proper interval between the fr
This mention had been seized upon by Magner as r
terial for pleasantry, but there may be some truth in
maxim that every knock is a boost, because his ridic
fixed it in the mind of the managing editor, Moore, e1
though in distorted form. One morning about the Ia1
part of March, 1887, Moore came into the local roc
with a telegram which he slowly handed to Magi
Magner read the telegram and looked at Moore, \
waited expectantly. All of us reporters were watcl:
both men covertly. Moore cautiously indicated
Magner threw up his hands with an incredulous lai

1>I 1 1171 It I'M'I

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tir .:.,:: ,•

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M : i

Vrl, ! i ; ,

.r i f » , iti i! tu inn ,tl thrift
1U :. .i! f) r )j, lei I flUjmint

»' . ', i * 5l r, •* / « r i uMt-

t * ^ \, 1. . 1 1 ;*Mit r hu h

, * .[ . ,. I:. ..« i- ti{ th*-,r

»•, ^ j ,41?^ * N , \< a ihr Kan-

I CM',! t; ilr »*<%,« ) T i i I • M i a, ...?;'. I *!ii% -J.iiiclri,

4!;il 4 lit r r • t * . J ,,t r rl i IM. ! P! fhr I If** , A i

J tta. i».»«,!^?i ! ?M. '.,' a ! t*r ,' »:r t/.J.i'.t in flir hold

iiiri)^, !< « i \1 ' ' , I' ' ' '», i . j , iif !MI i! \ 1 If i if

i iht !«j u* ,is i

itn f t : i r • r l), M c t u dr |>M/r*. I Ili-tl C,i4\, Sir

1 c\ > ^^, 41- { « * ' M !i«» t!?ii ,il If »<5il^f , rlif frfurti

llii. %!,nt»* , j -* !" n lu In J!*lfjiiij4 ia\ !*ir;iL{,r*l I
;rli*l %, |j*, f ,', ,* f / !f !<nf**4 »*,»<! »' a . 'JiM-An a van ant
fill n , »ai» t ' t :j tf'r « !.ai r i4 tiiiiJiid It!»rL Tin*
cuj ;.}! !i* t : i • yr ! IM , u! D ihr «!«nnwa\ and *». atdi
inr !im .h j{ \ iKi/L V* ) ]* I I It I* Sifii/c d r\ri \ thinj;
lllu! iiidtinl i; !.!»-, I ''':? l-»i a pt«»pit<T«u ^i ittr hotrlk
Uiul !,r an«! l«. . ' '! '* i* «i«f *».tli}trii Hir /.rn/rls t«> tllltf
Mu\iU \rrl\ »

2i8 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

During the afternoon I got from her a better insight i
the politics in the State from a woman's point of v
than I could have got perhaps by two or three days'
aided reportorial inquiry. Getting to Leavenworth t
night, I made Mayor Neely's acquaintance under tB
favorable conditions also, and after a day there star
over the State. I made the prescribed tour, sent
stories and drawings to the New York World, and it i
fun to be able to draw freely with a pen for publicat
for the first time without an interfering medium.

On Saturday, April 2, I returned to Leavenworth, i
called at the house of D. R. Anthony, brother of Su
B., to see Mrs. Helen M. Gouger, the militant suffraj
who had organized the Republican women of Kan
Mrs. Gouger was in good spirits, because it was felt
her party associates that they would carry the State i
that Mayor Neely, the Democratic candidate in the <
of Leavenworth, would be defeated by three thousj
majority. The mayor himself privately conceded an
pected defeat by twenty-five hundred.

I had chosen Leavenworth as my headquarters
election day because of its nearness to Kansas City
one reason, and largely because of my new friends
for Mayor Neely and the comfortable quarters at
Hotel Delmonico, kept at that time by two Ital
brothers named Giacomini.

For herself, Mrs. Gouger said that she was there
cause Leavenworth was the Sodom of America. I cal
her attention to the significance and the gravity of 1
characterization, both of which she said she knew i
stood for; told her the statement was to be printed
the New York World. As it would not appear bef
Tuesday morning, she gave her full permission for

f \UJ {>! 1 1 I/I It I'M1! It^ .'-'I

,m i.,,,. ..

int.-uh.t-r 'i
Sut«'.

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11!).! Sir-, '.'.r:r f ;»
lJ.r 4ijl. , ,,,,,.,,,-!

tti.Cf.. r!r-. •' J "J

220 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

As the constable and I approached Judge Plowing
court policemen had to make way for us through a crc
which was threatening. One tough individual with
unshaven jaw close to my face asked if the World I
sent me to Kansas to fight the Knights of Labor. Wi
out speaking, I gave what had been the secret signs
membership when I was a master workman of •
Knights of Labor. It seemed these signs had been sup
seded, and my use of them rather increased his an,
and that of his gang. I got into the court and in fr<
of the judge, however, unpunched. It was a serious sit
tion for the artist and the humorous writer for the Wo
and Post-Dispatch. To paraphrase Mansfield's Pri\
Karl, "I was two men, and she arrests me both/'

I looked about for Mayor Neely. No friend was
sight. I began to write a telegram reporting the siti
tion as briefly as possible to the St. Louis office. A:
wrote, the prosecuting attorney addressed the cou
He was asking for an adjournment of the case ur
Wednesday. The judge asked if that was agreeable
me. I answered that it was, but as I spoke a card ^
put on the telegram I was framing.

The man holding it said: "I am your attorney."

The judge announced, "Then this case is adjourn
untH »

My new friend of the card interrupted him.

"Pardon, Your Honor, we demand immediate he*
ing."

"But your client has asked for an adjournment
Wednesday."

I, too, begged His Honor's pardon and said I had r
made any request. Personally I wanted to be agreeab
but my attorney, Mr. Thomas P. Fenlon, would condi

Ittn PI f !!/} It r\l 1 :

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JaiUr'. (*, Hlt!'4r ! u • . 1 i " ?! f

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* i i * , A hrrr

- • 1 4 lu a,ill-
if . **

222

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

ironic cross-examination of Baker that "stratum" was
the singular not the plural, of her Latin noun, the poor
lady burst into tears.

The case was dismissed and in a little while Leaven-
worth was again covered with handbills issued by the
Neely camp, saying, "Mrs. Gouger repeats her slanders
in court."

It is difficult at this distance of time and territory to
appreciate the agitation that this charge of immorality
and corruption made upon that social section. That
afternoon and again next morning, election day, both
the Leavenworth and the Kansas City papers dwelt
sensationally upon the gravity of Mrs. Gouger 5s accusa-
tions, with the result that when the lines formed at the
polls there was the unusual sight of the finest women in
the city pleading with their humbler sisters who worked
for them as laundresses, maids, or in other domestic
relations to come to their rescue and resent this slan-
der.

It was an exciting day, and when the polls closed
everybody knew that Neely had not lost by any twenty-
five hundred. At 7.30 the report came in that he had
lost by only thirty-one votes, and then, a half hour later,
after some intense scrutiny, the final result was an-
nounced,

Neely winner by a majority of sixteen !

Neely had represented the liberal tendencies of the
community and of course the municipal organizations,
and when the sixteen majority was a settled fact at about
8:30 that night fire bells rang, engine companies turned
out, their red-shirted crews came to the Delmonico Hotel
and in a kind of Mardigras excitement ran their hose
through all the building. I don't know just what that

n?\ivn H \m

NHV !.\II iU'HI >j . i\ k\\ -V> ( I! V

In tiir '.(>ii , «>f i . . • J • •.(,!',.. • , t<. i(,.

t.int f»,'iUr It: ! ' •• ' ! ! ' r t' , , - } , »

thirr^ \. « . :,, t ,. ',..,; . . • ,., • , . \i *,,
I.Uld ,'»\ ,i \ f : • i- • •, .• J i • ', ,• \,- \

h.uf luvi 1 i : • j , , , • • , i ! i,, . , ,• t

vital v».t*-,, M. ,;•;, (, ,' i .-,,',' , ..„

UVll.i I) „ • „ I', , ' ,, I ! ; :, . • • • .i , ,..,

•v isilin,', jj.i'i. !• 3 , '• > ; ' i !• i-, .1 • '• , » .. J , .

uf thr(iji,),,.j.!,,-: : . i',. s. ,• „ .1 ,, t,' ,• j; ,, ji , . t
and Hr-iu-Il. ,'i i }. , ,,?.,. t . t li;'. ... ,. ; ,.. j«; t- ,. a
tinic, an. I v,i» 'j.tii. n. ,- i , j IJ-K -ti. ;f i -, . I ,j i,-.i,
the- pni4u, h.it! u.i.!-. .,•,-» , .iJ... v ,., ... j, t , ,,jr
hun.lml .tMl ,..!! -,.,i, , • t rhr ' us- ,.f \,- -, \ .„,. ,,,

wiiiilj ih,. ,-', , »: ,; j ..; ,.,<

Bil* thr I "" .1 . .t ! •! -1,- ',•! ,,,-
Ml, ,,f |SS- >., J ;., t», <,,' .

fhrlr „ i ) .' (, . ' ..... j ,,,..,.. j , , ,r

k JI.ITJ, ,• ;,, {} . . s; i.t,., >!,,!»;,-. 1 L »f } « 1,.,,;!!
in- dan,"'.""; J-, ,,j .,» ,jn ,, .. ,« ,i., , ., t ,.w 4j ^, ^^ Jf,

lilt' VHiliiAc-.! II'I;'T,-

rcpunrn/, th,- Sutr ,!,.:,,.„ { j', J,i tl i t,,-v ',',," ',",
make iw.) rouiui ni,,, i,«tA,-nt ti» -.tau-.n atai thr f..n

224 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

My good friend, Mayor Neely, and his banker partner
said they would hold their offer open for me until my re-
turn, and they did. I gave the banker a draft for rail-
road fares to Gibson.

Ni-W I- MI Ui'Hl-l •• i\ :, V. v-' »

in/. MH. -, i' , .:

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h.i.nc <!;•*: ,!"!:' k'

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ami .1.;
as hi- HM'-J.
in a tia !» i **
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Siir \\d
at Tah

of K:i/!i,i: Jj'r i* ,«.- i ! •-. i , ,
th.it /I t«!r, J!''! '.f ./»* ^ k •< ! i » J :*

Illttliiri 1 hi.! «<•!, ,t • M .'. Mf /

fathrr vta , in ,•,-•*** j •' 4 .? M , I ».
at tulilr f«»! f .M . * , • r ;* r i! , .* If

Slum! i»pj,hr|fr Ilir 4* i t *< f ** i! ^ ! !
Oil {ill f.u!>|ii! *.^hr'r;M if'*. *Jr; »«•!,/ ir.;« '

Ai»oul \W<!t;r-,.! r, • ^jf %f L.r-«i in f'» *
1'hrrr \\a- u |*l';a » n r'u* ( \\n«>.**
\\antrtl inr i«* Iraiu, I / »t i! jNifr ?!

ffut h yrar ; ;i;5tu; Snl I hall ?&»-•«*! f^f,4»
or th«* {H4iJn! Irrfh a» .1-r :M]I ! i i /

\\ttliirll ut*» !. t4»ri *}!*•! alt tLr i;
Shr ttaMi*! h»i!*l ,IM»( IT .». a ,i*l I «; •!
trfl uir thr I.u.i !i »•! if, 1 .'.. 1 t:!
III (*ht*inj,fr, liM^f;!!, laii'l'J >4 tf*
rlst* ovcih»-ai uif, I , a'*r if ill th»
could fjir am phta.r <»| «;. IM.I ?« » ."

•*. n .it If1!"*

t; it .'-r
'.»f 'i J !»*»

u; Js r > r%,

? ! -«i!h it
•» !' r ii»**»^r«
^at ^n a in. in
hr /.a. '.till a

226 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

each day, a total of thirty-six miles, on a little cow pony
hired for the service. Along the trail the grass and spring
flowers were showing profusely. The ride was pleasant,
and during the week's stay in the quiet place it was agree-
able in the saddle to think over the offer by the generous
citizens of Leavenworth, under a total misapprehension
on their part, to give me an afternoon newspaper. The
prospect offered immeasurable possibilities to a man of
thirty, not unfamiliar with politics and in thorough sym-
pathy with the people of the section. But to accept the
offer would mean the abandonment of a long-desired
association with the theatre. It was a difficult choice.
On one side was a property established and in the hand;
on the other, a dream.

In Gibson town, besides the station house, a dinky
shed, at once passenger and freight depot, there were
exactly two houses. One of them was occupied on its
first floor by a small general grocery store and post-office,
with two family rooms above. The second red frame of
four rooms sheltered a squaw ma.n and his full-blooded
Cherokee wife, besides three or four small children and
his handsome half-breed daughter, aged eighteen. There
was no hotel, no boarding-house. In the squaw-man's
house I shared one ground floor room with a great Dane
watchdog. Before my coming he had had the bed to
himself. He was a particular dog, and during my week
there never grew fully reconciled to my using half of the
bed. If I turned over in the night too vigorously he
growled, but perhaps because I stopped promptly each
time at his first growl he never bit me.

The window was open. There was no lock on the door.
Two or three times each night at irregular intervals the
dog suddenly bounded through the window with terrify-

A-

hiul- 1 ,

lha! i r(!

IIIKH r }*»«
ultra !<*<,

' r; M! lit ;* tMfj 1 }MI! a til avuty,

. i •/.»*<*,, pull*, tritnwutril info

}!*•,?»•' i, .'Mr, Bir ill. i I ami

< ( ij4 , ;»f»- u.fa ! v,a , ui

^ t i *.< . * t «?i * ! } t.c , I !> it ! I »*M * 1 1

• ';il r> j» u ! . * f \t A I . , !and

i * »!*• , ,1% I !; .«. !'T hat Haniil-

iia-r if

;u«»m

C * , \/nfHf ua'. an r«* Li -ji.i/i4 pajiri «»} u

I'uin (14, s . *f 'i«?itT i» i a!!»'i} |>atin

ulic\u!\ f»: MiiJ f!i inat'ft a!»«»ut

I, It!?1 i *tl f i ' I -

I iilln! i* it h ^ r< t* *.* !ii»* ;, saat and • r!m li d matin, and
v»wr ill r U ili* . I L id an rdit»»ual i *»!tiitin and a dri-
niatit drjuit nrn', I **..r. in* ic u-irn-lrd in I!H* latter.
Iltr liH.i! nil*-, I'll.r^r'.ri j »•* i'»!t\ \\ a . manipulttfd lu
f unpaid ihr » j*ri t iii ».i f i ale-! ^i JM\ 1 lu* diamatic imlrs

and " n\' jj> ;> i . r Jilrlrlf JA f !'* f *»r attia* f lu|j\ ifial V\e fllld
anam'ed in! .4f'd » liiri , I:* ,t *.< iiM'irii lu i rl.

buying sugar at the grocery. The big storekeeper was
speaking Cherokee to them. After they left I got near
the door, because there are things a pretty girl can say
to a stranger with more propriety than the stranger can
claim in saying them to a general grocer with whiskers
and a flannel shirt and a gun.

I said, "Mr. Brown, will you translate a sentence in
Cherokee for me?"
"Certainly."

I can see him now tidily wiping out the big sugar scoop
on the scales with a soiled towel. The sun had gone
down. Outside it was dark. He waited. I repeated the
speech just as the girl had pronounced it to me, but with-
out the teeth-and-eye business or any coquettishness, of
course. I didn't want him to plead my impertinent man-
ner as an additional excuse for violence.

As I finished and he shook the sugar crumbs from the
towel he said: "Oh, yes, that means, 'The Lord is my
shepherd; I shall not want/ "

The next day Mr. Elaine was sufficiently recovered
for me to leave him to local reports. Getting back to
Kansas City I met by appointment our old advance
man, Frank Hamilton. Hamilton was the owner of a
weekly paper recently started, called the Kansas City
Mirror. He was also the owner of a lease of a proposed
theatre to be called the Warder Grand Opera House.
He offered to give me one-half interest in both if I would
help him in their management and would decline the
Leavenworth offer. I returned to St. Louis, closed my

23o THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

As the editor of the paper I met many old theatrical
friends who came as members of the companies that
visited Kansas City while the Warder Grand Opera
House was being built. I also made new acquaintances.
Among those the most lasting and agreeable was that
with Edwin Milton Royle, since author of "The Squaw
Man" and other dramas, but then playing juveniles
with Booth and Barrett. Royle' s play-writing inclina-
tion was a strong bond between him and me.

Kansas City was organizing a great exposition. Presi-
dent Cleveland came to the town with his bride for a
visit of two days, during which municipal activities —
public reception, a grand ball and the like — made such
demand upon the local papers that I was called in to
help the reporters of the Kansas City Times, and began
in that two-day engagement a valued acquaintance with
the author, Roswell M. Field, brother of Eugene Field.

The opening attraction of the Warder Grand was to be
a week's repertoire by Booth and Barrett under the man-
agement of Arthur B. Chase. They were to play six
nights and two matinees, and were to receive a guaran-
teed share of three thousand dollars a performance, a
minimum total of twenty-four thousand dollars. Each
man was a favorite in Kansas City; Booth was a popular
idol. The Warder Grand was to be a good-sized house.
We had plenty of publicity. Prices were more than
doubled. There was no reason to doubt returns far in
excess of the twenty-four thousand on the week, and
Mr. Hamilton had no difficulty in giving the bond that
Manager Chase required. Things looked fine.

As the summer waxed and waned, and as the theatrical
season came upon us, it grew painfully evident that the
opera-house was not going to be completed in time for

M \\ i M i

\ i. v, v- tin • i

i , i

* ' *' • t r

tiiiti h»i», i , ! ", , T ^ . * . '» i" fi : t.r ,

Oil t/»r 1 V.; • i i , ' , r 1 ',r i »< ' ,, I «r'M * i %f

LOW * 4v I f " , <! u * » ' ? ^ 1'f,, I » a » ^iji^'r

ami w« . I u» f ! * ' . ' t\ j, fit v v, »*h a IM.

f»:i^rH\tl I ill ni -,» r»«r j ^ if! i , i , 4 f » ,i lif^ hi U mi, U r

rcarhrti K.I •, i < ** , v« * !r, .»Mt-n » »u ,r.ul fi.it thr

uH'Un v **** thf ,'i 1- ^*! ^ it, f»4'»' ,r r> ltk-1 tl.i'ir /a.

still in* i * if li , • * t , , • i !,,M-H i!'4i . ,*,iuift it*un tl'r

i!if Ik, i!'-!ii> i , ,4 ,";,! I * iir put in |»!.i»r. I KI-

n* . I * I I , t » I

U*f t! « j ,i i i * > iiifn lo! If f r il ,.u »„ i! ru

tn thr l!i!rif^.jur M, •, V A\ J / M! i.-r.r tlir cMlilt

I \\\\ ail*!,!- 12 rut 1*4 r? >;*T , i-v»»-(,j }iti • inn- inrii \\l\n
wrrr islSiu/ if ;\nh ***.'»* in, i,i^$i .!*•*!, in i«i»« ,. 1 hr
rchrar.^I v*i\ iliaiu, r/j^ ,r( ! i. i i^iilii ut luisii the*

(lit ! •:•, '• i !* '

iitir nl t f «- ; * •' *

tftf '* t! «
tin f}v <«'

i ', '

1 ' ,

'*»•.'«

liM.lHtr ,'"<;: J \ ,

nt the hm' i. . I
.v. ;i j'.u i J f >''

ili-.h.-l.;, .' ..",'

uhiih h.i.1 .'-i-., -I

C >a!r a* I *if,f\ \ l>
r<(rtaIK in* »*1,, t ; •
plav thr 4 .*{,« *, \

lllr lllf U I* * u :

! '•

i r it ! r

\t*

ic f ^ f

a f

i , i I

n itr null l « 1 1 Ir t r *»

oi i'

and no neat. Hamilton and 1, two Craig brothers wno
were interested in the enterprise, a stenographer, and
two men from the Mirror office met the arriving patrons
and explained the postponement of the performance
until the following night.

There was a good deal of grumbling then and a great
deal of confusion at the ticket-office the next day. Dur-
ing that Tuesday, however, Hamilton got some tarpaulins
put over the roof and brought four large cannon stoves
into the theatre. These stoves were set up in the private
boxes with pipes leading to the nearest outlets and kept
red-hot during the day. At noon Mr. Booth and Mr.
Barrett, with their fur collars turned up, were on the
stage again looking at the still-forbidding conditions.
As there was no other assistant who knew anything about
moving scenery, I was in a suit of overalls to help Hagen
on the stage.

One green hand trying to take a wing across the back
of the stage got it wabbling on its forefoot and then let
go of it as it started to fall If it were to drop flat-sided
it would come down easily as a kite falls, and without
much damage; but edgewise, and dropping as a knife-
blade, it had lethal possibilities. There was no time to
talk. I jumped at the two stars whose backs were toward
this menace, pushed them violently apart, just as the
scene fell between them, striking the stage where they
had been standing, splitting the wood of its two-inch stiles.

Mr. Barrett, in real tragedian fashion, said indignantly,
"Don't put your hands on me, fellow I"

NKW i'MI-'lU'KIsl'S \\ KANSAS UTY j>n

thin/, s»U'i a hvidjh.j d«'!!,u*.. Oar O, t"!>n dav a vuun,>
MM?* niM'i,Jtt j,» .'H»* a ju u nunu**. tij>t «JuJt hr ui.hrd

l^1 ''«"H, I :4M;su.<d In iiMil it, aIl!iMi^;!i 1 i<,Jd hj;a the*
kaiV>as t au A/;rn»r v«,is nui hnuit^; liv'tina. Affn a

t*l mv nqjrit, I irail

A% I jr.iil M;I 1 ',.u-i ?u in\ ,(•!}. **J}' 1 had TI* stair fliat
4*4HC ih.'ll1'- ihr A,r* I *,';.*i:M Jii.r l*i v.iilr i!/*

AilMlliri |M).i,-t.ij»h ,4j;-l I su;-!: l- \VrII, That'-. llir way

1 *!itf v» iiir it,"

f IiiMf.r.J hn!tir«i!-, i!u«*u, h ihr si'iijit
vmiii^ iii.in it hr v.,;i% fhi* ,iutSs'»i §4 fStr
fir was. He- v*;t. h**t ,i Jah f pri\ .n, an*!
\\rlt* l^n MI!II;MI,IJ. if, s!au*i;n^ al lijrii i .I
Huiiill^ t*li l!ir ,!'i!;r,

SM I fr!l i . »ui»i,,< <*\is rn?t:t/ii lu \»t\ IM

«t\* # t ^ i»»

i «»u ir a Ji4j !

Hr spuuu- IM his frrl Bifii tiiir iiiili^ji.il
in> rtuti^i t. i!/:4!i»i!i jjiii .i»!*li^; ^lljjti »>i

av. a*, is ih\ i,n in^ ru ui 'nii
the* lillr itf1 *A l.fM^ni.^al!! H.m^uxr/ "

I fir frilmv ua* su iist<"iu J;n! lhal h«* ftaiM nu
an av»rnl.

I said: "If \uu vJIJ j,^! liumr t«« iftr {t;i|*n( lima mliii'li
>*»n cupiril this ^MM*!! liiitf iin iniziafs, C*. T,# at fist" h»«t-
t«»w u!' that st**i \ /*

Hi* **ait! ^Vi"/1 and viritf *»ut, *la^rd at flit* wis<,'ham*t*
xvhii-lt li^ff niaifi- hint }nii!|; to an nliM-iur prr^iit sitting
tn a \\t4sti*in nlfi^ r 4 uiiii fir had v*»j»U"d vn!i4fint JVutit
an iiastrfii duiK, nulv fit dis*nvrr that in- had pfatrd
ifir stolrn aiiirlf in iht- hand-* nl it% authMi, 'J'hrir wnr

tUlirtV million Mlhri Uli/rs;% t»f thr I iiJti-d ^tLtfr",,

Ot luui'sr tltr liars nt * i>iaatunk'ati**u <»a this Jittlr

234 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

these thermal centres that suggested Birnam Wood on
its road to Dunsinane.

Some prudent or habitual gentlemen had brought
flasks with them. Others went to the nearest places of
supply, and the close of the intermission took on a con-
vivial even if precautionary color. The greatest enthu-
siasm of the night — not excepting Mr. Booth's reception
— was for a line which perhaps in all the previous history
of "Macbeth" had never called for more than a giggle.

In the third scene of Act Two the Porter , roused from
his slumber by the knocking at the gate, says, "But this
place is too cold for hell/' This was greeted with a laugh
and successive rounds of applause, and then recurrent
ripples as the audience waited and congealed. The har-
dier ones stood through the whole play, but the house
was half empty when the play was half over.

Through the balance of the week conditions were im-
proved, but it was weeks before the house was a finished
theatre. The total receipts on the week were eleven
thousand dollars short of the company's promised share.
The manager of Booth and Barrett properly called upon
Hamilton's bondsmen for their guaranty, and our weekly
Mirror, with its editorial and dramatic department, went
into the general liquidation.

One happening during that editorial incumbency that
closed in such summary fashion is worth telling as a coin-
cidence. The business men of Leavenworth had wished
to have something written about their section that would
call attention to it and yet not look like an advertise-
ment. I wrote a story which they approved and which
carried the facts, and yet which seemed to be a bit of
romantic fiction. Under an arrangement at regular space
rates it had been printed in the New York World, and
that paper had sent me a generous commission of some-

.1,

thr wink/ 1 !"M H «• »» « ' <f
ti in i «!!r I it f * \4 ^ \ «»n..
A->i«h- t'n-'» Ml. I !• * M .«»i

•! !* i Ml , 1 J

t'1 » j i • «M in l*
• •*'! I'* hi 'Hi^

(Hill,! 1, * « »M II f! ..T ,i" . ' * l ! * ?: tl t rl.it *l i Hit tW

tfir All.i' !:^ .

\\ h5' «»• ! f ni (t«* f • > i i *!<* * «f J ' f 5* f ^, nt, tltr

t» , n>i» »>! t « \\ r ' i * » i. «\ " « I« ? l »•! t ! « ««j « ta-

ur,»l utth ,i «» i, !« i l.i.' •.* f *n / i'i a "- /air
u.i*. aln^f | i -,? M , i i a 4«l J I,M v. / • * jt t j* « »,

I HI la! , I Jir ,i ",« .1 vdi\ 111 !f ; < 'M« I , '^ ill!, if utl I

«ltt{ in I tn i i !*•« »* 1 1 -I1**! p*i J* uj> f 1 » » H' i «»t \l.iv* r

Ki;ih ;iini Li . }»,'"M i .r « . .at* to in f i!! uir in <»vuin-
vliip antl iJii«.fr'M 4 f * 1 i ,IM n'A» ill* .' r»jn»^»/i/. Hut

a* I 1 1 ii H HP if i h T'M- ih«»*^ hi tii^t ii" * in 1 1 m i in l»* 1111%
MY i*l«a ^,tit- \M t|i frulfK Ibiuri! IH l!u l".4!4 an! to
thr lljnlif". t u i %»l IMI l!n ),u I ih il I v a . ah tqurntK
MU'i'i-ln! in I)M! lull, <*MI* ini^fil utlh appaii-n! ju.liir
iiutkr t*r,tr ai«JiM I*!MHI .IHM tip»»n I riu,, %l,i, r-"4nu'k.
But '.la, «•• fihik 1 \\a» ti «!" nrilhu thr,i UHI att«n%ai«i
ha\t* I Irl? 411 , in i trnt \\i .h 1** at I, IMas in , v*.a . a inc-nir*
In tltr nhtinatr at » p*hf Hi«"f t * »i pi t\ "^ Hi u*/, and 1 liunL
it \\utth uhilr li*".'., v.ilh w!»ativri HtLhl ainjlt-iiig 1
\vritr uia\ i-arn, t<» -.a> a hr.iiii'iiinr, v\t*nl t»» llir pt-r-
si\trnt \«4ing man in llir nri/.hi»'-»ili<»*»<i <*t thiity Yrars
who, cIc-'.jHlr thf ui-Ju-s «*f hi5:, pnulc-nl i'rinuK, Ire-Is u
call to i'fiiiuvv his prrvatr lu-nt,

they have their interest, I would like to jump ahead and
tell the only other remarkable one that is in my^own
experience. I rehearsed and produced a play called " The
Other Girl" in 1903 with Lionel Barrymore at the Cri-
terion Theatre in New York. It was in three acts. Ef-
fective ending of the second act depended upon the m-
voluntary laughter of a parson, prompted by a wink
from a prize-fighter who was in the room with him. On
the opening night the effect fell short. I had to leave
the next day on the steamer Kroonland for Paris. Walk-
ing the deck of this boat four or five days later I still tried
to analyze my failure at that point. It occurred to me
that certain business between members of a group on
the opposite side of the stage had made a stronger ap-
peal to the attention of the audience than the quiet minis-
ter and prize-fighter on their side had made, and I men-
tally kicked myself for my stupidity in not discovering
this. I went at once to the wireless room and sent the
following telegram to Mr. Charles Frohman:

"Have the kid touch the parson before the wink/'
Mr. Frohman rehearsed this business. The action at-
tracted the attention of the audience, who thereupon
saw the wink which was the provocation for the laugh-
ter, and all that I had hoped for was secured.

About a month later Mr. Bainbridge Colby was dining
with the Thomases in their apartment in the Latin Quar-
ter. He said: "This strange thing happened: On the
steamer Cedric, when I was crossing last month on my
way to London, I was in the wireless room. We were

4.** K*:ti tv.otit,, L% f h< v*,», M
«'.! fh« •'I'f I f oi j"a« * h"W in*

h 1 ,! i. \ a *.*Mn* t! ..I * p, i*! »» «

ai t r ] i^ «- it

^ * * j >t , * i
i ^ « » a

??i * if

t < 1 1

f i! I4 '**\
I Lr n if ut

c«i ttifd in
s j n i : n i a I
<!'*r < a »

tai v « n < ;*

a 1 1 ; I', !it i]t
in tLf in<>H

, am

l!u Lf fi! f|i jjj » M 1 i" ,» r,iJ,i j* ff » .JM I Lr ,*Jr ««f lf*i Kai k
that I ,i*l i «*v, r* * i! } •< * if nr ?M ! a Tn»!« f Li K»uK nt
*.«aur inuii!e-]fil lull j»t!''«»uT *r ii „ *•! a n»< tfitu.trtiuiii *Lc*fi fi
fl-a! \*.*t\]Ji{ liairjr i ft. 4 4 fial\ jilitf !fi Iiiiir fni llir jut»ni«
11!^ rdl! i. in,

I MippM-.r sl ua*» in\ * **a, r i I^IM! »nJM\nt*nt i4 flic4
(liaiiia'Ji i If nun! in at v !.a}»p''wr/t tl»at If lit /r%| t»i jn\
p»fn|.|i\ tM flu lifr |t«^*;« u*; *tttJ tu llir ii«^.j»apii liir i
Ju .*.. Cji;iilr% Kijapj*. I!H ptMjiiif|i»i *4 flu papu, u,i*
a man liinf i»% all fhr ri*ipl«>\rr*.. 1'iat L O'Nnll, the*
rtiiiiiij \^a- 4 piftiuutut irpMiU'i ^Lu had <ir '< r *.<•«{ !n *
:id\aiu rirr U, A 1U1 A piit|iiiilni v, Im i ain«' t*i u, thai
5»t!ifiiiii i v,.,*h n \ nlutiitrai^ it If a., i*»»!jr »»! v,h:i h 1 HI. til
11% *aih'.rqiiri4tlf, |tr,li!/c'*I. \w* Mi, <,haih . !l, J«»nr", *t
small, r!ij|ihiilh , lamna' jif*!'-*»!!» v*it!i t iliauidiii.ti \ Milt--
vJti'^krfs aiui an citfiir a!*.iiar «•{ thr pti4onaIiT\ that
appraK l*i i he \\ rslc-iu piofliit t. I If i hait^.fd thr h«*no2ni

constant to the same pursuits as in youth!" Nearly
twenty years before, in a similar mood, he had written
in the same journal: "Men go through the world, each
musing on a great fable, dramatically pictured and re-
hearsed before him. If you speak to the man he turns
his eyes from his own scene and slower or faster en-
deavors to comprehend what you say. When you have
done speaking he returns to his private music/'

And his private music is his self-expression, the most
important function in this personal hypnosis that we
call life.

After a few days of uncertainty I began work for a
couple of weeks as the artist on Willis Abbott's after-
noon paper, the Kansas City News, and from there went
as the resident artist to the Missouri Republican in St.
Louis.

Mr. Sothern came along about this time with the
promised interview concerning "The Burglar." No
fledgling author could ask for a more complimentary
opinion than Mr. Sothern had of the play. But as a
star he felt that it would be prejudicial to his hopes to
undertake a drama from which he was absent during the
entire second act. He wanted me to rewrite it so that he
might appear in that section. But though the burglar
was out of the second act physically he was very much
in it as problem and menace. In my stubborn insist-
ence upon the script as written at that time I left my-
self, as far as theatrical prospects were concerned, still
stranded in St. Louis, "

M \\

\ K \\-.\

241

t!.

in I' •• ,• .

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l, as

Om- still

a?I«l thru r, ; 4 I

ItOi ,| Li* »}, 4

thr ! is ,,J »', - ,' ;
1 Jic M *, , ,i ; * .* ,
tuini il ir*>- i l,i«

ff'Ilt r l»*| ', •„ »• * i

, >»**.*' 1,1', r w .r. it !«•-

I I r i * . .! j,!*'»!i **a ihr

: .if ,r , /,i i rii»} hv an

. ' , •,«;.<'::.. i" fi.ii k'* and

I ? ! r, i !«-in t , of uttr
» i »«! l Vri, ( hji ti.iiii

tl .'i ,J »*. Vi ^ h ,Ut <»ltl J«t* illniirtf

I , i , 4i i ,i ii ,iiin if it him,

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there shot a more intelligent gleam and he started to run
for the brick station house itself. Latham made a dash
for the train, which fortunately pulled out as the bel-
ligerent citizen burst past the ticket taker and into the
inclosure. A witness of the whole performance might
have called Latham's attack unwarranted hoodlumism,
but it wasn't that; it was simple exuberance of animal
spirits, and very much the kind of vitality that when
the offering is more a matter of personality than of in-
tellect finds a market in the theatre. Latham himself
had a successful engagement later in vaudeville, after
which he came back to the ball field as a coach.

For men who are trying to write for the theatre and
are impatient at the unavoidable delays it is worth while
to take stock of my first arrival as a man in New York.
I had in my trunk two long plays and five or six short
ones. I was thirty-one years of age and had had an inti-
mate acquaintance and relationship with the theatre
nearly all my life. I had played many years as an ama-
teur, three or four years as the occasional member of a
repertoire company in the legitimate, and had more than
a year of consecutive travelling with a company in which
i had an interest. I had produced four plays that I had
written, had had two years in a box-office and had shared
for a few full minutes the lease of a theatre, while never
losing sight of dramatic authorship as objective. I had
refused to rewrite a play for so promising an exponent

tL L ; ^^^ ^ in °rder to keeP in touci with
me outness and do something that would occasionally

JULIA MARLOWE AND OTHERS 245

m my theatrical education. With all the duties of this
>osition I was familiar.

In St. Louis I had gone with Barney to the critics and
nore than once helped him on his publicity. Notwith-
standing that fact, and knowing my job, I was compli-
mented when Barney asked me to participate in the
Councils of policy with him and Stinson. There was a
litch about the matter to go upon the first three-sheet.
Barney and Stinson were comparing adjectives to de-
scribe the supporting company, and for one reason or
mother hesitating over all the trite descriptions. "Splen-
iid," "excellent," "distinguished," "adequate," had
^ach some recommending and some objectionable fea-
:ure.

Happening to know that in certain sections of the
country there had been some regret over Mary Ander-
son's revisiting her old territory with a company that
;vas exclusively English, I suggested dismissing all their
idjectives by using the word "American." This so
caught the fancy of both men that they used it not only
:o describe their company but to describe their star.
Fliere was an implication of rivalry about it; but fine
is Mary Anderson had been, Barney had a star who
;vould stand comparison, however invited. All the parts
;hat Miss Marlowe played that year I had seen played
3y other actresses. In nearly all the plays I had played
;ome part myself. I felt qualified to form an opinion
lot only of Miss Marlowe's work but of the business
vhich Miss Dow had devised for the other members of
;he company, and to which she held them with an in-
lexibility relaxed only when the opinion of some equally
experienced person, such as Charles Barron or Mary
5haw, convinced her of its value.

CHAPTER XIV
JULIA MARLOWE AND OTHERS

Julia Marlowe, our young star, had played as a c
As a young lady she had been carefully coached man
her of parts by Ada Dow, who shortly after the se.
of which I write became the wife of the present vet
actor, Frank Currier. Miss Marlowe called Miss ]
Aunt Ada. Of the several parts in which she was
pared Miss Marlowe had been seen only in "Parthei
in which she unquestionably excelled any actress
her generation remembered. Colonel Robert G. Ir
soil had seen her performance in this part, and had .
moved to write a letter of such high praise that Mr.
ney had sought and obtained his permission to ha^
reproduced on his large printing. Barney as adv
agent had visited St. Louis twice while I was at Po
My engagement was the outcome partly of the acqu;
ance then made. He had with him as adviser an
vance man, Fred Stinson, who had conducted more
one tour for Mme. Helena Modjeska.

Stinson was very wise in the matter of arranging fc
mate repertoire and in getting public attention f
female star. Barney had been a newspaper man; !
son was himself a writer with an ambition to do p
So the association of us three men was at the stai
agreeable one. Except to get the names of the com]
and be told the salary that each was to receive, it w.
necessary for either Barney or Stinson to lose any

244

Ill Lllclt 1JLI5L

lillb UCJLlCl WcLb CJLlUUUicL^CU.

by Miss Dow's watchfulness in tKe wings and frequent
critical comment right after a scene. For myself, how-
ever, not unpractised in estimating such work, and with
the better vantage of seeing all from the front, there was
evident an exuberant personality of Marlowe's own, a
personality thinking and implying and conveying a most
bewitching overlay around all the set and studied busi-
ness of the teacher. Nobody I ever saw on or off the
stage could put into two words the challenge and the
retreat, the winsomeness, the temptation, and the clean
innocence that Marlowe, as she sat on the log near Or-
lando, put into the words: "Woo me."

During that period Miss Julia was most jealously
guarded. No senorita had ever a sharper-eyed duenna,
and I thought then that the balcony and the Forest of
Arden were both gainers because of that background of
repression.

What a national possession a generation has in such
a woman as Marlowe ! What a change could be wrought
on our national speech if one such exponent might be in
every great centre where the girls of America could come
under her repeated spell.

Besides Stinson, as playwright, there were in that first
Marlowe company Mary Shaw, Edward McWade, Albert
Bruning, and Dodson Mitchell, all interested in play-
writing, and all still prominently before the public. Miss
Shaw and Bruning were wise in the maxims of the art.
McWade and Mitchell subsequently became skilled and
successful. Mary Shaw was easily the intellectual centre

gesture and competent, well-shaped, responsive hands.
Her mental equipment included gayety, hospitality for
humor, self-reliance, ready emotions under fair control,
a capacity for attention. One great value was that her
beauty of face was of the kind that the stage enhances.
It is not unusual for a parlor beauty to be lost in a stage
frame; but Mar lowe's features were of a scale that fitted
that larger canvas. This harmonious ampleness of fea-.
ture, the bone structure underlying it, was one founda-
tion of her voice, then as now the best woman's speaking
voice on the American or English stage. I had heard
Charlotte Thompson and others in "The Hunchback/'
but none who by sheer variety and charm of tone lifted
from mediocrity and made memorable such lines as "I've
seen the snow upon a level with the hedge, yet there was
Master Walter."

As a beginner, meeting admiring callers in her hotel
parlor or behind the scenes, and even on the railway
trains with the company, there was about the girl a slight
self-consciousness, a willingness to look to Aunt Ada for
moral support, that was altogether girlish; but on the
stage that near-timidity was transmuted into an arch-
ness quite devoid of embarrassment. This archness
hovered over every playful line and inhalation — per-
haps inhalation especially, as inhalation is the tide of
what the Scot called the come-hither influence.

In those early days, watched by her studious support,
it was a question how much of her effect was the girl

giving information. She had also been the leading sup-
port for Modjeska, which equipped her with many of
the traditions of her chosen profession, but better yet,
as far as her companions in the Marlowe company were
concerned, gave her a fund of anecdote that made that
season a joy. Mary's particular hero as a raconteuse was
Maurice Barry more. I had not met Barry more at that
time — did not meet him until nearly a year later; but
when we did meet I felt pretty intimately informed of his
professional and private career through the stories of
this generous biographer.

Albert Bruning is among the prominent players of
New York at the present time. Previous to that Mar-
lowe engagement Bruning had played Shakespeare in
German, winning considerable praise in the part of Ham-
let, and in that excellent and American company he was
a notable actor. In "Romeo and Juliet5* he played the
part of Tybalt. As attractive as Juliet was, and as mag-
netic as Taber was in Romeo, and as Barren was in the
part of Mercutio, when Bruning was on the stage as Ty-
balt he carried such a quiet and intense air of menace
that he was the centre of attention. Theatregoers of
the last year or two will remember the fine impression
he made as Polonius to Walter Hampden's Hamlet.

The first time we put up "Romeo and Juliet/' I think
in Washington City, the company was short one mem-
ber for its long cast. An actor who was expected from
New York to play Benvolio missed the train that would
let him arrive in time for the performance. It was

JULIA MARLOWE AND OTHERS 249

;oo late to change the bill, and at Miss Dow's suggestion
[ agreed to go on for the part if we could find a costume.
3ne member lent me a pair of tights, another a pair of
ihoes, and so on. I definitely remember that Frank
furrier furnished the doublet. He was a slighter man
;han I, but by dint of compression I got into his gar-
nent.

Benvolio's most important office is to catch Mercutio
vhen he falls wounded by Tybalt in their duel. The
;cene went remarkably well up to this point, but when
iturdy Charley Barron, wounded, dropped into my arms,
;his tight doublet of Currier's split up the back like a
•oasted chestnut, and with a ripping noise that defied
leglect by anybody in the audience. I doubt if the death
)f Mercutio ever got so good a laugh.

Charles Barron had supported the greatest actors in
;he American theatre. He was a product of the old Bos-
;on Museum stock and had been at times a star himself.
rle was an acceptable Ingomar, a good Mercutio, a fine
Waster Walter, and an excellent Malvolio. Few actors
>f his day, and none of the present, had better diction
m the stage; but in private discourse he was singularly
meven, at times almost inaudible. It amused the other
nen in the company to compare notes and see which of
hem had Understood most of some speech of Barron's
is he stood with a group on the street corner or at the
tage door, mumbling as he mouthed his tobacco pipe
md emitting now and then some staccato explosive that
erved as a stepping-stone through the maze of his unin-
elligible recital.

Stout Billy Owen, another Modjeska favorite, was at
hat time a tower of strength in any legitimate company.
Vhen he played Sir Toby and Frank Currier was Sir

JULIA MARLOWE AND OT11KRS

iarther south where we hat! a tftiarantv and needed it.
Flu* only train that would make* our connection left at
.en o'clock in the morning. Miss Marlowe, Miss Dow,
.heir maul, Frank Currier, and myself, who were to $*o
;o the station in the carriage, met in the hotel lobhv at
.he proper time. After a wait of a minute or Uvo, whm
he carriage didn't appear, we telephoned tfir liveryman,
vho said that l!ir order had heen fur the same hmir in
he evening which was ahsurd. His rij; wasn't ready
,ntf there wasn't time to j*rt ii.

Currier and 1 fathered up the ha-ia-e and uiir mi\rd
iiiintet Wi»nt to fhr street. No pa-.M-i.-t-r con\rvanee
,*as in sight anywh<-re. To miv» the* ;;uaiant\ in that
.<*xt town mean! disaster. I stoppnl a man uho \vas
rivinj; a i-overed milk v\a-i,n, Af'irr In , uf much
recious time ht* declined to c*»n .idt-i !f>c- pmpn'.itif»n
liat I made. \\ r mnvc-d mi to thr utinei, IiMpin;* to
nd our more \\illine,. On tin* • idr -Jin-i at the* intc-r-
•i*tion ••tnn«{ tv»o I.uye I'miniuir \aii-, \\ifh j»irfiirr% of
leor-e \Va- Iiiu: imi t,a tin if -.ide-, and l;u;-.e Irttns an-
tMmcin:* tln-ir a!»ilit\ fui fun- or %fiuil hauK \\iih fumi-
ire, N<i tfii\iis \\rn* in *,i"htfc hut a slmut into the
doon un thr i-*»jner ptoduci-d i»ne. I askri! him what
:• would ehai,'r to take the fi\r of u». to thr •.tati*«n,
)out a mile* awa\. He said U\M dnllars. I piumi'.eti
:m fixe if hi* r«»t their in four mhmtr';.

He j»«»t ontti hi% hu\. Cunic*r and I threw the Im^a;>r

over the lovvneil fail , atr, firfped thr tw«» ladies and
•,v maid jit al'fer and el/juhnl in our,rlvr»,. It was id-
ost. a stiaidit itm t«» thr %lalioa. < .'i-Main ufr.tarlc-s in
r street nrer-, -ilatrd our eitr/,in;« ihr^ far !i;u.-k% once

twier, in v.hich maniruvre*. thr -,ii%'Hr%.f livirij* Julirt
•<.»rh<'t«*d Ijrt.'.rrn tin- thin mattjrv.t"* that lined the
•<> sidrs uf thr van.

25o THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Andrew Ague-Cheek, with Barren's Malvolio, Taber's
Duke, and young Ed McWade — the best double Miss
Marlowe ever had to her Viola — playing Sebastian, with
Mary Shaw and Emma Hinckley in her other women
roles, the public was offered about as good a cast of ac-
tors as America gets at any time.

Robert Taber, our leading man, had been a Sargent
pupil and had learned his business with Modjeska and
Charles Coghlan. When he had been with Modjeska the
leading man had been Maurice Barrymore, and con-
sciously or unconsciously Taber's leads with Marlowe
strongly followed Barrymore. It must be said that he
could not have found a better model. Taber came of
fine family. His sister, who survives him, is the wife
of Henry Holt, the publisher. He had had a good edu-
cation and fine associates. While I was with the Mar-
lowe company he was my nearest friend among its mem-
bers. Taber liked a good laugh, but his bent was essen-
tially serious. His happiest hours were after the play,
when Miss Shaw would let him and me have supper in
her room, while Rob persuaded himself and me — per-
haps rightly — that he was really discussing philosophy.
I would not doubt it now but for memory of Mary's
laughter.

When Rob and I were alone he talked much of the
star for whom in that first season he protested positive
dislike and fortified his feeling by many minute fault-
findings. I was some fourteen years older than the girl
and a good half dozen older than Rob. The phrase "pro-
tective coloring" was then not yet invented, but I was
not astonished some two years later to read of the Taber-
Marlowe marriage.

We were to leave Trenton one morning for some place

JULIA MARLOWE AND OTHKRS -55

leaving the pay envelope I hoard him quote in nu*Ian-
choly tune Honititfs line:

"But; even thru, the muniing em*k crrw louif;
And at the M»UW! it shrunk in haMr aw;i.y,
And vanish M i'nnn twr r.f^ht.**

The average man must always envy the well-storked
memory of the cultivated player. What a dclij'.htful
element in the bright talk of John Drew, for example,
are the pat quotations that sparkle through il from its
remembered harking,

Ariel Barney, proclaimed on the lull', a', presenting
Julia Marlowe, had business ahiltu, Marlowe had
genius. There came a time in the ;r. «ieiaUon <»f tltrM*
two factors when stuve'> . impaited !!nnr\f'; %rii*<e t»f
proportion. The pervw* who fr!l the ion- 1 <jueiu*e of
tins inisconc<*ption mo« t \\ete Stin-.on ami in\ ,rlf, uho
had been on intimate and tttntdK iflninn-, \\itli hint.
I think, however, that I would Lair p*ne thtou^Jt the
other two months needed to hnrh the4 ^ra-.Mii if il hadn't
been for a trick hat.

The American theatre was Ics* a httMiir%% and sin in*
of an institution thiity-thrrr years a^u, and Marlowe's
aucl unices in the cities were the mvuvst in formality t*>
tht>sc* of the };rand opera. T'fierrftirr in ilic* eiiir.% her
business stall* divssrd. I !i;t«f n fur collar and this acct^r-
dion hat as I stoud at the door. ()n«- fuirut of Barnry's
solicitude for the stai was in canv to fin df«- .in,; muiu
door a bottle of Guiunrss's stout. This mini M.itjoa didn't
occur often, and when it did Miss Mailov. r didn't fib*
the tonic. On the hr%t night of our second en.s-tftcment
in Philnclelphia tfie Iobl*y was filled with Mat low r\ local
admirers.

252 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

As we neared the station we saw one of our company
pleading with a nervous conductor who was running his
left thumb over the heavy crystal of his watch after the
manner of railroad men. Currier and I whistled shrilly,
the actor saw us and explained to the conductor. A min-
ute later we swung tail end to the railroad track like an
emergency ambulance and the day was saved as Currier
cried, "Out, you baggage I" The train was rocking under
way as we went down the aisle to our seats, the sym-
pathetic company full of questions to the agitated ladies.

Currier, the first man coming after, explained, still in
mock heroics, "We had to drag her on a hurdle thither/'

How often the human mind accepts intellectually a
fact long before ever dramatically or emotionally ac-
quiring it. Thereafter for the much-amused Marlowe
the angry Capulet had a magnified reality when he
scolded the cringing Juliet:

"Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds,
But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next,
To go with Paris to Saint Peter's church,
Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.
Out, you green-sickness carrion! Out you baggage!"

In the theatre, as far back as I remember, when
salaries were paid the old actors called it the ghost walk-
ing. Our first old man was a youngish actor named
Jimmy Cooper. At that time it was customary to pay
salaries Tuesday night. One Tuesday, however, the
money had to be conserved to move the company. As
I neared the door of Cooper's dressing-room on my way
back-stage he watched with hopeful eyes my coming.
When on the return trip I again passed him without

,.,,„

Jtl»jl4

•K'l.IA MARI.OW!-: AM) OTHKRS >9-

The Bishop experiment that impressed me most tint
first m:;ht was his |2adinn while hlindfolded -,n ^tide
earned from the stane and hidden *„„„•« hm. ;,', (Ij,(
vast audience. To do this the volunteer u ho had hid-
den the article down a side- aisle was makin- hi- - econd
trip from the staKc In-hind Bishop, «!,„ was eare,^ d,a.>-
tfrnji ium, The volunteer, determined to rive no I,',-!,',
to the blindfolded teiepathi-.t, was rmt onlv han--'
buck hut was looking at th<- ceitin- of fV.-mu'.,l . ja^ „
a refusal to indicate in an\ manMc/'tltr I, ,c.,t '',,!» '• "„,'. !jlt

Near the hiding-place Ili-.h-.p haltr-d, and a.'!, i a
ful waver turned to the andie' , <• a.id (I;. !; •• l-[,j'
is not comjjhinj', with conditi..n .. |i,- ;,, ,,,,, thin* ui"
«»f the place where this anicle i-, hidden. \h' j|t ,t' !''''!'{
jnmi his mind is a pietnie of ..{.,j; 'Jf ,.'• Iu ., ,,,,;,„' ((f
tairness the audience {,,„.,! in,,, ... t,(MMlI ,,,- (,,;]lln!M,
re-anhn.:. that n-adin- l,v Iii.!,llp a. ,,„„,, ,,., , ;(|M , llt;m

On \\ednf, lav Bkhop uas ill. Rij. |.,\. .'„„'{' 'j'^j jJV

tlav as his advaruv man. I t,,,|.'v,:h wi,^,", \ !i||
s.u,U. „,.«.. paper clipping. Thru- rt .,,,,', a ,,„,., ltf "
UI' U Mn:>fr J«l«"J-.«ai»h or anuhin-: of the ,,..,,.,1 „„{„.
"u-nt ..( the man ahead. OidinaiiK for a vi it in - attrtc-
tl"» '» a |;i»v hke Minneapoh-, the adve.t.Mn paiH-r is
-n the walls on Thnrsdavniorninn. The ad, , , ti ,,„,,,„
'"r '" 'ht< I'^-'P'M^', and ..,,,-h -.pace a, the di.unatie

!m'Vm< " "f: r" atv"!<} thr a"'-'11 I'-''- a',,,d, {„.,.„
partly used. N,,,u. „, tllr,(, }a,ul;ii(|l. t, „,;;.;„„.

I have had oc.a.ion to sa^ I«f,,,r that I ui-h J ,ni.,|,t
jvnte .sonu- ,,f th,-..,. st,,,J,... uijh.na h ,!„,;• ,.v,.Mi,,«lv

knowwhatadevilofaf.no.. Jam. But the evpeiienre

254 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

In one group were Colonel McCIure, the publisher,
and two of his friends. Barney, who was tossing a silver
quarter in his hand, at a break in their conference called
to me at the door, "Thomas, Thomas!" Ordinarily we
spoke to each other by our first names. In the surround-
ings referred to and under my silk hat the peremptory
"Thomas!" had an office-boy sound. I joined him.
With some display and without leaving his friends, Bar-
ney extended the quarter and said, " I want to get a bot-
tle of stout for Miss Marlowe."

I heard myself answering, "Fm a stranger in Phila-
delphia, Mr. Barney, but if I were you Fd try a saloon."

Colonel McCIure and his friends laughed.

The day I got back to St. Louis out of a job again I
called on John Norton at the Grand. He was talking
to John Ritchie, who had formerly managed Mrs. D.
P. Bowers, and was then handling the thought reader,
Washington Irving Bishop.

Norton said to Ritchie, "Why, here's your man!"

It was Tuesday. Bishop, who was having a week's
engagement in St. Louis at Exposition Hall, had to open
the following Monday in Minneapolis, and his advance
agent had left him without notice. I went that eve-
ning to see Bishop's work. It was astonishing, and as I
came to be more and more familiar with it afterward
it made upon me a profound impression. It deserves
to be described at length; but as I am trying to write
here only that which affected my ultimate vocation, I
shall tell but two stories indicative of his peculiar power.
In other articles not included in these remembrances I
hope to write special and extended accounts of psychic
phenomena. But I explain my wish for brevity if not
my achievement of it here.

L'uder, asking him to postpone the execution of thr hoy
[aiming to be;1 innocent until Bishop could reach Minne-
polis on Sunday, when he would agree to read the mind
f the young man, reenaet the crime, and define the boy's
ssoeiation with it. The editor asked for the letter.
enrolling through my pockets 1 was unable to find it.
eareh through my bag also failing, to produce tt» I told
iiu that it must be in my trunk, but that having origin-
Hy written it I could accurately reword it.

When the afternoon paper appeared its first page car*
:ed a ten-line scare-head beginnm}*, "Hupr fur the Bar-
It Boys! Thought Reader Washington Irving Bishop
,sks a Stay of Kxecution/* And then fulloucd rnorr
eseriptivo lines, scaling* down to ilir written iutrodue-
on and a copy of the letter I had composed; also the
nportant fact that BJ-.hup was to niiivr Sunday and
Kit his arrival was piepaiatory to hi% week's cn^a^e-
tent at the theatre. That aftesnoon all Minm'apulis
ud the information. I went in the jail, explained my
ill to the captain of the puliee, was permitted to see
le two boys, and ettnvinced them I hey had little to lose
i permitting this expc-riincnl by Bishop,

I wish to say here that my confidence was based upon
u* fact that Bishop in Portland had made it simifai visit
> a criminal's cell and diamati/ed his crime- Both boys
'en* glad to «,i'*n \\hat I set down for them, which for
urposes of brr*\il\ and dramatic value read simj.)!y:
We are willing t<» wail/*

When I reached the uflice after leaving their cell in
ic jail I wus conJVi*nted bv a di^nified, inartmMooking

tion oi theatrical business men, predominantly advance
agents, numbering about two hundred. Their taking it
as qualifying for honorary membership is the most ex-
pert rating I can quote to justify my belief that it is
worth telling.

At St. Paul, a half hour before my arrival at Minne-
apolis, about eleven o'clock on Thursday morning, I got
a Minneapolis paper in order to see what opposition
Bishop would have in that city. The front page was
covered with sensational accounts of preparations for a
double hanging to occur the next day, and extended re-
prints of stories of the crime, the trial, and futile efforts
for rehearing and for executive clemency. Two boys
named Barrett, employed by a street railway, had been
convicted of the murder of a passenger at a terminus of
the line. One claimed to be innocent; the testimony of
his brother supported him. It was plain that in regular
course Friday's paper would be filled with this same kind
of news, and that it would be Saturday or Sunday before
the papers would print anything about Bishop with a
chance of attention. The biggest possible distraction
was the sensational hanging. To be noticed at all we
would have to get on the band wagon; have to go with
the hanging and not against it.

Arriving in Minneapolis, I had a cab driver take me
to the principal evening paper. I asked the city editor
if there was anything new in the matter of the Barrett
boys.

He said, "Nothing/*

one nigni in jcueisou \,u\l .\USM»UII. * lonoranie i./uviu
K, Francis, recently I'nitrd Stalr% ambassador lu Russia,
was then governor. Mike* Fanning, aheady referred to,

was his secretary. The p»vernor, who was unable to
come to the theatre, sent an invitation to Bi-.h»*pt Ritchie.
ancl nu% to take supper at the man-Jon. i!rvit!r% the live
men named, there was present only t!u* |»nvfinur% %istc-r,
Miss- I'Vaneis. After supprr, uhrn th<* i\n\cinni' uishr<|
to st*t* u clemof!N!ra!iui!t Bs%ht*u a--Lnl him t*> j.;t> alone
to his library ant( sfli\-t a w«.»n! funii anv !*«»»k. \\'!irn
the governor returnrtl \ve all fnllo\M-»l hini a»\ain into the
library. Bishop \vrttt in an uidinarv walk !o the pniprr
bookcase, took down without hrMlation llir pr«tpc*r book

tlu*re w<*re p<*rhaps tw'o thotr.an*.I in the fount upenn!
this heavy law vulninc-, Iriinrd \\iih.ni.! hr-.it.ition in tlir
[>rop<*r pa)^<\ went, down the pa^.r, put hi% linger tipon a
certain word.

Governor I'Yancis »,aid, f* I'hat\ if ! ITat'-. it !**

The* whole prni-r«ulin/( fh'i-i«pifii but little inoie time
than I have taken in if, div tat-on,

A few days ihnralfn ftiirlnV, Bi !top,, and I wrnt to
Nfew York. Bi-.hop and J. I.rsv, ihr ^iral rmm ti-,t,
had met and aj\irt*d nimn a JMiul tmit {«K thr Jiillo.%inj't

rir t«i be equalK iulrir ,t«-d. It
jiir,^ pttipo-ation, Hie- s>irtdav
V«»ik Bi ht»p wa . a . nrst
ihi-, c'vhil'ition

•jeason. Kitehie and 1 wri

,t)oki*tl like a p-jud litijii

light after our animal in

it a Lambs Club (/a:n!».»l

:hat 1 have drst/n^rd, t)ut«»i J, A, Itvuti a mt-mbfi,

,%ame in after miditi ht, '\,i-. -.*i;*tual about what Iir had

iearcl, urged Bishop in ivpeat that te-,t nr p^iiorm one

r i«-pc-atc-

°rder to

for a show-

but an

' ^ °Wedge °f you

condedt8 ± ^ As
for not bemg impressed " '

mUSt eKuse

hanged some

issued beginning with

fallen at 2gbt

the proposal and appeal ofBfe t

and the governor's declination »

ter had been telegrarfS Tto St

receired a wire frol g^ St

one hundred dollar,«

edltions extras

*** had

editioM

at the '"'•

The mat-
, because I

a nre oar,«

p arrived on tine and we had a sensational oper,

CHAPTER XV

MAURICE BAKKYMORi; AND "THE
BUUH.AK"

In tin* early summer of" iHSt>, finding myself in New
York and unemployed, I was j>!ad to accept the offer
of Mr. William Ci, Smythe, who hat I associated himseli
with another ynunr, manager named Charles Matthews,
to produce a four-at t plav, "The Btn^jar/' whu*h I had
built up iruia the sketeh "lulithaX Burglar.11 Maurice
Burryrnore had ju*-»t t'lt.v.ed his eii|,*;i^(einrii! al ihr Madi-
son Square Theatie in a siuvesst'u! run of Ihuidtin (!hairi*
bers* Australian plav, "(Captain S\vif'i.f*

Barrymore al th.it time was not only the* iitiitiiire idol
but \vus the {'avi*tite ItMdiiif man ft! most of the theatre-
going men of New YoiL Mv hr4 tueettng with him •--
in tact, my lirst identifying si^ht offiim was in ua office
on tlu* second !!*H*I ut'a ittinnled dwelling cm Broadway
near Thirty-first Stieet, \vhrfr Siuxthr urul Matthews
Iiad deskri'ooiu. Will Sun the intrudtjeetl us.

As tliis Miiifiii}% keen-eyed, huattsoim4. athletic fVffuw
shook hands \viih me ant! looked rnr ovrr as critically
its 1 w*as I'c^ardln^, him, he said: "'Soirtrwhut of a husky,
eh?" and, still holding my right liaiul, j;i!ihc*<i in playful
burlesque pondenntMtev; at my ni»s wit ft his leit. As I
instinctively stepped him he added: "Know something
about that, di> \ **.»?** I have MTU h«iys of ten Iirgin
acquaintance in similar pretense.

JCil

260 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

similar, and although Bishop had been cautioned against
overwork of this kind by his physicians, he repeated it
successfully and fell into a cataleptic fit.

On Broadway the next day a man said, "Your star
is sick at the Lambs/'

I found Bishop in a little hall bedroom on an iron cot,
where he had been for twelve hours, a tiny electric bat-
tery buzzing away with one wet electrode over his heart
and the other in his right hand. He was unconscious.
Two doctors sat smoking in the adjoining room, tired
with their watch of the night. I looked at the hand-
some face of Bishop and sat beside him for some min-
utes. Although he was to every appearance dead, a
deeper solemnity suddenly came over his face. I stepped
to the doorway.

" I think there's a change in your patient, doctors."

They came into the room and said at once, "He's
dead."

In half an hour I was on the way to Philadelphia to
break the news to his wife. Five hours later I was back
in New York with Mrs. Bishop.

With Bishop dead, I was again out of work, this time
in New York. Will Smythe was also there and our meet-
ing, together with the fact that Maurice Barrymore,
who had just closed a highly successful engagement in
"Captain Swift" at the Madison Square Theatre, was
willing to undertake a summer performance of "The
Burglar," embarked us all upon the production of my
first four-act play in the East.

during that ii.'ia' ,n • ' • /

none informed v !f (J< ,,, ,, i i

in six pieces of mi-i,-. "I ,; • •

World," "Redd,.-, I ,,.,,.' •• •• ., ' „

ter/' and "NcA B! ,,}'!.. " ( '

being written f.u him. ' ' " !

I never saw H.iin M-.- r -, , j ,
ous portraits of him. \i" •

American theatre h,>m , • ,

Barrymoreuasta.il', {I,

man of them all. J{,\ ., ,-

identical with thu-e «t \ j

that for Jack's porti.^}

had the challen;-,,- and r;:,- •

Physically he w a-, far i, , • , ,

der breadth aeerinii.-'f.-.J ', ' ' ' '

and weighed abuut ',„„, j,'.' , '

In romantic COM ume-.r i,, , ,

nad the grace of a pamlu-s < j , .

or coffee-house lu- ttil. ,„. i ;

ably indi/rcrent to I,,'. .,,'/-. ' / "' '

could be proud of IiiVMI,," •' ' " ;

fighter or a. saft..fJ,nVrt\Vi " •
unless some savant «.,, :^,,^
or French roma..,,.
that time tlie
ti Lyed silver fn

as "Captain Swift'- ,„ , ({l .n

servatory, holding in |u-s , - ""'' ' T'' • •

from which his- attention I !'•' ' ' ' ; '•

/§ f " ' ••'•:'• • M :,.i.

I I

and the prize-fighting excellence had gone to Lionel.
There is enough truth in the comment to justify it, al-
though both the boys are much more protean than it
suggests.

Mentally Barrymore was capable of interest in the
most abstruse questions, but as far as I was qualified
to judge he did not care to seem profound. He was vastly
more amused in surfaces, but to the depth that facts
and theories, forces, events and expression in all forms
did interest him his was the quickest, most alert, the
most articulate, the wittiest, and most graceful intel-
ligence that I ever knew.

Once, describing to me a fight between a pet mongoose
that he owned and a cat, he said: "All you saw was an
acrobatic cat and a halo of mongoose/'

The line could have been paraphrased to describe any
tilt in repartee in which I ever heard Barry himself take
part. And yet I never heard him speak a line that left
a scar. It is hard to quote some of them and convey
this conviction, but his smile and manner, true declara-
tions of his intent, made the most acid speeches amiable.

I was delighted, of course, to have him chosen for the
lead in my first big play in the East. These young man-
agers were considerate of my wishes in getting the entire
cast. Other prominent artists engaged were Emma V.
Sheridan, who had been playing leading business for
Richard Mansfield; Sydney Drew, then in his early
twenties, but already a favorite as a comedian — he had
been featured in a play of Gillette's and was regarded as

irgc MUKI-.

Joe threw ami lost, ami after the order was I'lvrii, heing
Lso in an actor's summer, made a tour amunj* thr mem-
•ers of his own company, horrouin^ for thr pmspcetive
ill. When the checks came Barrymoir paid f»»i all thr
Inners. But Sydney's line of "Hij'Ji man out" passed
* to the company's quotations and on all occasion, was
scci to exclude anybody flow polite or }.;nuiou» entei-
rises.

Our rehearsals were in Boshm. Knou-inj* how mueli
epcntled upon the result of the \raftm% 1 uas espei-iallv
watchful, trying to dt^taeh my?.t^If an«! loo! ai thr pn--.rn-
ation ohjretivelv, a*; a eritie in t!»r fhrafie, ! eutild M«e
.othing hut smvev*. As a tom h'«t«*nc' toi m\ <".tjmate

iiad of course the rather full i<iou! o! flu* little play
r'hieh \vas now the third ai*t of fhr \xt\ nm\ \atuially
be story iiitnintrd to that, aiul flu* i»nntft act, uhieh
'tts li Iojr9ii*;d sequence*, did not %erui to diop.

Our fust livjif uas not m»*ie ,!-oit ni h\ riulravoird
fiVets than most In 4 nights au\ lln* nn \«»u JH-/, of
.ien and women in a new plav is such thai al a hr-t pet •
.irmanee they nexn i\i\c their hest iiiiripirtali^Hi. At
his opening ihr call1* urr«* suthcient, the applause and
tughter were j',reat. Ilrfiiiid tin* curtain vu- ihnu.-jit
*e had a succ<-ss. Thr thine, that chillrd us was the fai!'
re of the inexpencncrd mana^c^nn^nt to *,av *'0. ll'irv
ad been in touch vuth ihr mm froiii the paper., and ur
,*It that they rrHected the u;lu:nofi of tlio\e mm.

Most actors have a ft 'jit diiuiri ar«»uud vi\ o'elnck
nd a supper when thr i\*nL l\ over, That night in Bos-

and to understudy Barrymore m the part oi the burglar.
Willie Seymour, later the general stage-manager for
Charles Frohman, was engaged to rehearse the play.
Mr. Seymour was an experienced producer — as a matter
of fact, had been in the theatre all his life, having gone
on as a child with Edwin Forrest in "Metamora."

The managers had little money and were staking all
on our trial in Boston. As a matter of economy the or-
ganization was taken there by the Fall River boat. No-
body in the company had any important money. Salaries
at that time were not what they are to-day. The largest
on that list was Barrymore's at two hundred dollars.

On the palatial Plymouth at the dinner-table we sat
down somewhat a family group. Barrymore took the
head of the table, with Miss Sheridan to his left. The
rest of the company strung along on the sides. There
arose somehow a pretended dispute over the honor of
ordering dinner for Miss Sheridan.

Drew said: "We'll toss for it."

A cube of sugar was marked on its six sides like an
ordinary die and given to Sydney for the first throw.
It was an anxious moment, the comedy of it irrepressible
to his temperament, and as he shook the cube in his hand
and looked at the other derisive men before throwing
he said, "High man out.55 Barrymore had to remind
him that the stake was the honor of ordering dinner for
a lady, but Sydney's line had revealed the situation.
Before all had finished throwing, Joe Holland, who was
with another company on the same boat, noticing the

of the management. I was staying in the old Clark's

Hotel, a place for men only. At, six A. M., I turned Into
bed in a room on an tipper floor with a door at ri^ht angle
to a room occupied by Smythe. The weather was warm,
the transoms were oju-n. I was waked about nine o'clock
by Matthews calling upon Smvthe. Through the open
transoms I could hear the dejected conference between
the two managers.

A bell-b«»y knocked at the door. Matthews took the
card.

l*'rom (Jrismrr! Kaeh man tried to pass to the other
the painiut dun of j»,»»m^ brlow to interview him. Mat-
thews iinall> went.

After a omsidrrablr interval 1 heard his steps come
cjuiekly to Smvthr's door, a sharj.) rap, an entrance, and
Jus excited tone as he repujted in his partner: **Why, he
still wants it !"

I;urtfier slcvp \\-as impossible to me. I dressed quickly,
and as sunn as I could do so diplomatically confirmed
the rwanin,', <»f tin- irpmt. Later I saw (irismer himself.
With the e;i'tr of* fur \ftnaii hi* fiac! dismissed the un-
fa vorabh* iioiii/fs, I It* had seen the play; lit* had watched
its effect upon f!i«* audience. lie saw himself in the part.

I shall nrvrr fni/.rl his lu-arty laii|*h or the strong sol-
dierly face- as hr said: "Why, my boy, it'll make a fur-
turn* for evri'% bodv T*

*I'hat was a hatd 'I'uesday fur me. The day before I
wotili! huvr i>i-t up*»n mv abilitv to bract* up uiuler any
conditions. But \\iint 1 !»»und Smvthe and Matthews
discounting also (irismer's optimistic opinion and ac-

\\ r ',»,*'*

. t! j.'i M! < ,;; I* t ,.
« '-a !« «' "1 w rr>* / t: r
I" ••-,:,

1 it ! fc*i .u r'i A idf I*

B . :

I f ' »

Pi Mi,

: .f \ **: , >u \i

4 Vi..*j r f4 «• »/

,lt'f i * *• , h ! *!• i ,» :IM J*+
|*i"^!tni .« di\ hr v* i

v» , ! 11 •, l)irrt, rth«»
l!ii%t l»u* A!IH Li*l .i?4
jiu : " \ i ^ , ( f a ,, 1\ f* J »

Hi. lu oar! in !.iv
{ )ic".v, s « iU h,i'» » /* a,4»i

S\$tiiiHs ttlJi !ir, i«»

t i i « < 1 1 i
i r% r! ! > .i»luru: \\ « *i,

pIi-.*.:lU, "\«i h.i.r,

l'ii

*! * he * ' »%{? I f II

.fit a**

J 4 « »tpff*I .

i * t u f * uii*f r .t !i« i^,
•„ i, aiti irtui nr« **) i« T i '„, tu » '.^ «f f \ ' \n il.

1 ,v»t Ml thin- m UM' ,c t » i' i ! i Mf «!**' , n I i li * .7 MM
• f r nai ujH'U!!l|% ;U*n*n.' llirllt JM .rpll ( tj i ' -« ' , a! t.

ltm«* .'i i'.tvuutr ;H lm nn ihr !*a ifir (jia*!, vJin* hr \
starling juinll> with hit i>rautiiu! and lali^iiftf \\

BARRYMORE AND "THE BURGLAR" 260

Our Boston engagement was for two weeks. The busi-
ness showed such healthy signs* that we were regretful
that: it was not for a longer period.

On Wednesday after the matinee Wesley Roxenquest,
managing the Madison Square Theatre fur A. M. Palmer,
proposed to Smythe and Matthews that the pieee he
brought to New York for as lung a time as it would hold
up in the summer. His terms were for the theatre to
take each week the first two thousand dollars. It was
of course possible to play to much less than this on the
gross, and for the management also to be stuck for
salaries and advertising.

As they hesitated Barrymore said: "Take it! If the
money doesn't come in you'll m\e me nothing, and I
think I can answer for most of the company.**

This decided the managers. As they -started to thank
Barrymore lie interrupted them: "Tin not doing it. on
your account. This is for Thomas."

The New York opening was a night of almost equal
anxiety to that of Boston. As one of the east I had only
the actor's biased opinion as to how the* play was going.
I was heartened during the first- intermission by a visit
of the comedian, Louis Harrison, who came* to my dress-
ing-room with a message from Bronson Howard, com-
mending the workmanship of the act just finished; and
when the play was over Harrisun came again to Barry -
more's room and mine to bring us good news and to give
his own opinum by no means an unskilled one that
we had the best melodrama offered tit New York since
"The Two Orphans/*

Bronson Howard was then in New York \\ith his pro-
duction of "Shenandoah" at the Star Theatre, where its
great success \\as so substantially the* beginning of Charles

268 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

ceptance, and regarding both as peculiar to his isolated
territory and his personal needs, I was a demoralized
author. One thing that hurt me much was what I
thought injustice in important press comments. In the
first act of the play my burglar was a man in refined sur-
roundings, speaking good English; in the third act he
was talking thief jargon. I had believed that subtilely
effective, because in my railroad experience I had seen
educated men quickly adopt the ungrammatical and
slangy speech of the man on a box car. Mr. Clapp, then
the principal critic of Boston, cited this departure as a
mark of my immaturity. The opinion marked only his
own inexperience with actual life in that stratum and
environment. Two or three days later some other paper
took issue with him upon the point, but on that Tuesday
I was submerged by that and other objections equally
valueless.

During a walk alone in the afternoon I found myself
looking into a shop-window with no accurate conscious-
ness of my surroundings or recollection of how I had
acquired them. It was only a dazed minute or two before
objects fell into their proper categories and I was able
to get my bearings, but the lapse alarmed me. A half
block farther I met Mary Shaw, whose home was Bos-
ton. Mary had seen the play and was enthusiastic in
her approval of it and of the work of the company. This,
however, was to me unimportant in the presence of the
lapse of consciousness I had just been through. In fright-
ened fashion I told her of it.

Mary put back her head and with her contagious laugh
of those early days, said: "Good old-fashioned bilious-
ness, my boy, nothing more/* Mary's diagnosis was
correct.

U) HSK auv uuu$; uut m LUC luniuui, iuici uie msi lew

weeks I sold my rights for twenty-five hundred dollars.
The piece did, as (Jrismer had prophesied, make small
fortunes for all owners associated with it,

When "The Burglar" went away for its first season,
however, its royalty of forty dollars a week was my total
income. I don't know what decree of fate led to sueh a
genera! agreement upon tins figure as my value, but with
certain obligations in tin* West economy was essential.
Smythe relinquished a second-story front room at .205
West Twentv4tft.il Street, over a parlor that was occu-
pied by an Italian who f.ave a table d'hote dinner for
thirty-five cents with a pint of reef wine thrown in. That
wan the dinner to which I treated Barrymore and asked
him if it wasn't a hue oflering for the money.

Barrytnore said: "Great I Let's have another I"
Tins second-story room was let for three dollars a week,
1 engaged it when Smythe I«*ft toward the end of Sep-
tember. It was a fine room for the money, being nearly
twenty-five feet square and having three windows at
the front. Among its few drawbacks were the simplicity
of its furnishing and a rich, permeating odor of Italian
cooking, never absent!; ant! especially high at the flood of
the gastronomic tides. Barry more thought that any-
body ouj^ht to br able to write in sueh rich and redolent
<juartersl away frmn all distractions and calls, and. when
the rear room on the same floor, separated from the front
room only by the cuMumary wardrobes and marble wash-
stands of that period, was vacant he rented it at the same
price.

Poll.55 Maude Adams was making Her tirst nit at tne
old Bijou Theatre in Hoyt's "A Midnight Bell"; Francis
Wilson was playing "The Oolah" at the Broadway;
Sothern was rehearsing "Lord Chumley" by Belasco
and De Mille to go on at the Lyceum on Fourth Avenue,
the beautiful little second-story theatre managed at that
time by Daniel Frohman and supported by a clientele
second only to Daly's. The McCauII Opera Company,
with Digby Bell as principal comedian, was in the midst
of a run at Palmer's; Lillian Russell was playing "The
Brigands" at the Casino; "Ferncliffe," by William Ha-
worth, was at the Union Square, and Helen Barry had
in rehearsal "Love and Liberty" to follow. Denman
Thompson was in the midst of his popularity with "The
Old Homestead" at the Academy.

"The Burglar" was a success in New York, and after
its first year on the road played with two and sometimes
three companies throughout the country almost con-
tinuously for the next ten years. I report this to record
a fact which may be useful to other writers. When I
was in St. Louis Will Smythe had written to say that
forty dollars a week was a fair royalty for a four-act play
by a beginner. In his own inexperience he had consulted
Howard P. Taylor, then somewhat in the public eye as
a dramatist. That royalty was agreed upon. I was
sure that Smythe had been misinformed, but the terms
were adhered to. The lowest royalty that a beginner
of a play worthy of production should have received
would have been 5 per cent of the gross receipts, amount-

UlCH JOHIL

was the old Sturtevant House, so that with the room
hark of mint* Barrymore quite honestly had four private
addresses.

One bli//ard night, walking away from The Lambs
(IIiil) on Twenty-sixth Street, I was stopped by a shiver-
iiuj hoy of twenty who asked for a dime to get a bed. I
took him with me, showed him into this back room. The
bov looked at the sofa.

"There?"

I sait! "No/1 pointed to the roomy and well-furnished
bed and left him stammering his thanks. About three
o'eloek in the morning 1 was waked by somebody strik-
ing a match ami turning on the {»tns. Barry more, drip-
pin*; from the storm, stood in the middle of the floor,

He nodded to the baek room and said: "What's all
this in there?*'

After cullrrlin^ my thoughts a moment I said:
"That's a little philanthropy of mine/*

"Well, where ant 1 to sleep?"

"What's the matter with the Fourth Avenue flat?"
There was some fnend there. "What about the Sturte*
van! House and (Jnuyje?"

Barrymore said; "i'thel is over from Philadelphia to
visit her mother, and I've been turned out."

"What about the room at Mrs. Hitf joins'?"

"Kinj* Hall has that this week."

I eouldn't help bushing at the picture* of Ameriea's
favorite and hrst-p;iid aetor, with four apartments for
\\hieh he \vas paying rent and no plaee to sleep.

-- .

retailed at ten cents a dozen. He declared his intention
of starting in the next morning to write a play. But he
didn't come that morning or any other morning. His
wife predicted that such would be the case. She said
their own apartment, wherever it happened to be, was
strewn with stray leaves on each of which was written,
"Act One, Scene One. A Ruined Garden. "

Some five or six years later, when I had built a home
and was living at New Rochelle, Barrymore came out
one night to read a play he had completed. We had to
explain the burst of laughter that greeted him from my
wife and me as he began to read, "Act One, Scene One:
A Ruined Garden." Not only did Barrymore never
work in that Twenty-fifth Street room, but as far as I
know he never came to it but once.

This failure to use the room is not astonishing when
we remember Barrymore' s way of living then. Rather
than store his four or five trunks of valuable costumes
which he was apt to need at a moment's notice, he kept
them in a little hall bedroom on Twenty-eighth Street
in a house managed by a Mrs. Higgins. The room also
contained a little iron bedstead and washstand. Barry-
more never occupied it, but to disagreeable persons he
gave it as his address. Mrs. Higgins was instructed to
say always that Barrymore had just gone out, and occa-
sionally some wastrel transient, on an order from Barry,
slept there. In conjunction with one or two actor friends
he had a flat on Fourth Avenue. I think this was really
the place where he preferred to sleep and to get his break-

CHAPTER XVI
GATHERING PLACES OF THE ACTORS

I had now become a member of The Lambs. At the
clubhouse I passed more than half the time I permitted
myself away from my writing. The Lambs was then in
its fifteenth year, and contained the best element in the
profession. It was a great honor, privilege, and education
to be received on equal terms by its then membership, a
total professional number of one hundred, which included
such men as Lester Wallack, Dion Boucicault, Steele
Mackaye, Mark Smith, Robert G. IngersoII, Otis Skinner,
the Holland brothers, George, Edmund, and Joseph, and
others worthy of the standard that these names indicate.

A table d'hote dinner was served for fifty cents at the
large club table, where the men were like members of a
family. There was a notable musical contingent and
often between courses the popular songs of the time.
The gayety of such youngsters as Harry Woodruff, Cyril
Scott, Fritz Williams, Francis Carlyle, and Ned Bell was
as memorable as the wise talk of such elders as Steele
Mackaye and Frank Mayo. Fun was spontaneous and
unconstrained. At one of these small dinners I began
my real acquaintance with Otis Skinner. He had come
in from a trip on the road, was greeted with shouts and
lifted glasses, and because the place on the impromptu
programme fitted it he stood in the doorway, and an-
swering the men's demand recited Beranger's "When
We Were Twenty-One." I shall always remember the

275

He Mini In--* ^U!,
Han \ tn< n<* ' «
°A Man nt r r U

ts ..it: .-n * .*t " i.

1 lira! » »• 'ir («»4 > «

tin* ut.i^ i * •'..« '»

with him ar«i !h» I ' " f^ * fc ^ > ' »t
a deridrdK n**A I , < ,! j:.* ? > , v* «,-,
theatie.

Hail \ w« *£ e had *A i J!r^ .^ 4 , »* > l , • )
jeska a *.!ui\ nf Hi • u* ! '» * ; ,»• 1 ** *"
in the npininii ui iuat% - :;!'»• \ * i
inteiiMly of if draMiali*. v » . ..<• * ,, IT »»
kind that hr '/.as^eil ii •- . M r
South their \\a* a pe-*«',;ti i 2? *- ,j !
fought a <hjel h\ tiia *«KJ, ! it f* ,1 a ! i
standing that l!u* man ' i. i f 4 t: r t< .
suicide. Ilii% amf nfhri u., , 'f -i . » ,t ,,
lion at that time, all n{ .ih u. v,*.;.»!
!>ined to make a Mot*, v, V* *j, u.j !rj !^«

leSS IVnipIr/* f Ml])!|,ifir ! f** Jl.ui *, ,?,.i;

urged hy their unihu.UMa, wr»tr in

Street room.

'/ • • i
f- - 1 1

! t'.r

\1 . i.

f «1 , ii4 v. » ft
» » i»ia ,4? , i .
' „' M?r, » •"

fjilr «if "K* ',-
,u.d lit!) 41 Js

ana replaced uu'in wiiti CUDCS 01 the lowering kma that
make central New York City a gridiron of box canons.

In iB8c) Madison Square had just won from Union
Square, nine streets farther south, its claim to be the
theatrical centre. It was the smart and modern spot,
although many of the actors of the comic-page, fur-
trimmed Intensity still haunted the older Rialto. And
at Fourteenth Street there was still considerable theatri-
cal power and vibration. Under the old Morton House
J. M. Hill still managed the Union Square Theatre. One
street farther south was the Star, where Crane's long
run in David 1 Jn\d\ ami Sydney Roseufeld's "Senator"
and other plav was in occur before the passing of that
historic house. Noith uf Union Square, where now stands
the lofty Crntun Building, was the stately, hospitable
Everett House; while In the east was Kieeadonna's,
famous for spaghetti and the patronage of the Sulvinis,
father and MM. Thesr, with the Academy of Music,
then run by K. (»* <iilmort% and Tony Pastor's own
theatre* just behind it, put up- their ancient claim for
attention. But thr f;i'-«hionable town was moving north.

At IVcfiU -itfth Street two tides of easy promenaders
joined in their iloun-tmvn drift, and returning there
divided for the noitheily walks, livery fine afternoon
otiier than matiner davs nieinliers of the .stock companies
of I)al>*«.( Pahn«'i\ and the I,veetun t!u*atn*s, and mem-
bers of otiuT combinations of nearly e(jual importance,
moved in leisutvl* manner ant! almost small-town neigh-
btirliness ihroujji the comfortable thrones of well-cfressed
and fairly inirlliric*nt Aiui^ru-ans, to wlu^m all of them

between Broadway and Sixth Avenue; the house an
old-fashioned five-story, twenty-five-foot-front brown-
stone dwelling with high stoop, under which was a base-
ment entrance. It was like its adjoining houses in ex-
ternal looks and faced similar buildings on the north side
of the street. Those respectable neighbors eyed it with
distrust. Leaving The Lambs and walking east to Broad-
way you passed the St. James Hotel on the corner. On
the other side of Broadway was Delmonico's, running
through the short block to Fifth Avenue. The block was
and still is short, because these two great thoroughfares
wedge sharply three blocks farther south. East of the
long plaza made by their intersection is the park called
Madison Square, a plunger fountain in the centre and
the Saint-Gaudens bronze of Farragut on the northwest
corner.

Facing this square on all four sides in 1889 were beau-
tiful and impressive buildings, each with its history fairly
mellow and all with their uniform sky-line that could
be enjoyed without suggesting curvature of the spine.

To have eyes and never to see the sky is to be slowly
and unconsciously immersed in matter. Where no vision
is the people perish, and the vision of this nation is born
and nourished and reinforced and sustained from modest
houses that are detached and which face four ways to
the weather and from which men and women look in
easy angle at the sky. Some one has gone further than
this and said that a view of the horizon is necessary to
the sanity of the eye. In thirty-three years Industry

FATHERING PLACES OF THE ACTORS 279

painted in after years for the late Knickerbocker Hotel
cafe, wit 1^ the difference that King Cole came from the
nursery with the* reputation of having quite shamelessly
and in buutc ^voix expressed his preferences, whereas the
St. James trio depended entirely upon the law of asso-
ciative suggestion.

One habitue ^vas Jerry Dunn, a handsome fellow
strongly suggesting in appearance former United States
Senator J. Hamilton Lewis, though Dunn was rather a
silent person. He had, however, killed a man with a
revolver. Another sport was Pat Sheedy, who managed
John L Sullivan. It was in that saloon, the story ran,
that when Sullivan proposed to heat up Sheedy with his
lists, Shrrdy, not unprepared for the attention, had
pushed u derringer against Sullivan's body and asked him
not to do it.

Some politicians came there. General Sheridan—
Silver-torigucc! Grorgt\ as his Republican friends called
him— livt'tl in the hotel.

On the nrxt block south from tin* St. James was the
Hoffman House cafe, perhaps the finest in the world.
The proprietor was the handsome, melancholy, gray-
haired Not! Stokes, who hud killed Colonel Jim Fisk on
account of the notorious Josie Mansfield. It was said
Stokes always slept thereafter with the light burning in
his bedroom. In this cafe, guarded by brass rails and
plush ropc*st hung an heroic eanvas by the great Bou-
guereau, a painting of several nymphs trying to throw
a fighting s;tt\r into the water. This prophetic symbol
was1 years before the general adoption of woman suffrage.

In the theatre the prizes are to magnetism quite as
much us to ideas or antics. Of the three factors, mag-
netism is the hardest to define. To call it attraction is

GATHERING PLACES OF THE ACTORS 281

reason— as slightly higher price or the watchful eye of
the house man, Billy Edwards, ex-champion prize-fighter
—only the better element of the men about town fre-
quented the place. A group of players and playwrights
at a table were uninterrupted. Men nodded to them,
or joined them if invited, but they did not intrude.

What wise conferences were many of those expert
discussions of current or projected plays; what con-
densed e%ixTtenee; what discovered and tested rules;
what classifying of situations; what precedents and
likenesses; what traditions, conventions, experiments,
suggestions; what a winnowing of ideas by what vigor-
ous, original, challenging, prolific fellows; and in what
free interchange in an atmosphere and temper stimu-
lated to just that degree* of exaltation that can bridge
and blend ami give an overtone and group consensus!
Truly, "Wisdom is justified of her children/'

For more private and smaller conferences, among
other places, there was also Browne's famous old chop-
house on Twenty-seventh Street just of! the Broadway
corner; one stum* step to the hallway and a turn to the
right for the parlor dining-room with its little tables, to
which a third chair could fie drawn; the hot-water dishes
fur the ft tady Welsh rabbit and the pewter mugs for the
musty ale.

I first saw Ptml Potter there, rewritcr of French
comedy at thr titw% but afterward author of "The Con-
querors/* "Trilby/* "Under Two Flags/' and adapter
of u half scorr uf farces. lie looked an oldish young man
then us, thirty years later, after the unmanageable
cropped hair turned white, he looked a youngish old one.
Barrymore made him join its, and then rallied him on
his theories until daylight. Paul Potter was always a

a8o THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANC

but to change the substantive. To call it pers
is only to befog it. To recite the reasons for n
explanation of it or to support my case adequately
controversy those reasons would provoke would ta
a volume. I therefore omit reasons, and avoidii
troversy issue only my belief that the force is ele
that its possessor is not its generator but its m
and that the voluntary transmission of it is exha
The truly effective actor cannot simply wipe off his
paint and turn in to slumber.

Our Favershams, our Hacketts, our Marlow<
Cohans, our Drews of three actor generations, our
mores of two, with the admixture of the Drew
our like artists of repute, as well as those yet un
ered and uncelebrated, cannot after a night's p
the psychical brakes and come to a dead centre
a machine before the stop, the human organism
the normal nerve rate must slow down. For thi
dation the ample apartment with trained butler or
trained maid and the presence of understandin;
rades who quit at the first suppressed yawn is ide

For an income unequal to such provision the
restaurant, the club, the cafe of the Hoffman I
invaluable. Let us not chide that immortal col
the Mermaid Inn, nor Chris Marlowe, nor Ben ,
nor Will Shakespeare, nor criticise too severely tha
at the Cheshire Cheese of which Garrick was s<
the centre and Doctor Johnson the mentor.

Into that old Hoffman House cafe from the IV
Square, the Fifth Avenue, the Lyceum, three t
within a radius of two blocks, actors easily drifted.
of Palmer's, Daly's, and the Bijou had but little
to come. The writers met them. For some •

mil wun only twelve ol these articles one has to do it
or hurt some of their feelings by leaving them out. But
back in Browne's in i88<; Paul told me that, us Diderot
had printed for him, our plays are written backwards;
that is, constructed like a mystery story, from the solu-
tion backward in the eiy^ma. Of course, it was helpful
to know that, and I've told it: to dozens of youngsters.
Who was it .said the unpardonable thing, the one base
tiling in life, is to receive benefits and to confer none?

There came into Nexv York that winter a typical
Southerner in speech and appearance named Colonel
Edward Alfneml. His home had been Richmond, Vir-
ginia. Other citi/cns of that place reported that because
of his courtly manner he had been called Count AlfriemL
The colonel was about sixty years of uj,;e, lull, suddenly
portly at the meridian, with prominent features, and
a walruslike white mustache, which with the important
conseiousnrss of an Kn^lish guardsman he stroked to
hold the floor in the pauses of his discourse. His am-
bition was dramatic authorship. His most prominent
friend in the theatre was A, XL Palmer, above whom in
physical stature* he lowered some seven inches. He spent
many hours in Mr, Palmer's of lice when it was evident
to other callers that Mr. Palmer was not insisting on it.

Reporting thde interviews outside, the colonel fre-
quently said: *'I am very close to A. M. Palmer."

After a cmtplr of years, with the assistance of Mr,
Augustus Pitou, who. signed as joint author, he produced
a play ttndrr thr title of "Across the Potomac/' His
second play, the only other from his pen as I remember

III,
hi-

1 <

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I In t i*. j »iir-*I «|'/' w! . * t t!.*- j

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%*!'*" ur* tilt- f i ,1 i , ! >i,
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c1!, a * «u

hint **!l!% a ff 1-4 *Arc%L',
n\ jrrt ;t!|ff ,ti!fJr% 1^: it
lull thr !*Mi,'. all LiiM

Fin

.'fir Illtlr,
r. "Sri*?
inr in hrir

an«l it»m*t

, I •»* l!n

in«-

it s all over/* And fir tau/hrti af;'iin, !)i< I

flat 1 wrote two plays, both under arrangements with
Manager J. M. Hill; one for Sydney Drew, which was
never produced; another adapted front the German,
which was produced more than a year later under the
title of 44A Night's Frolic," with Helen Barry, an Eng-
lish actress of more than masculine stature, in the prin-
cipal rule, which fortunately required that most of her
scenes IK* played in the uniform of an oflieer of the chas-
seurs. That, event lives principally by the association
of one of its least important members at that time, a
singularly active, optimistic, dark-haired lad of some
nineteen or twenty years named John I,. Golden. It is
difficult to avoid his name now amon^ the Broadway
white* lights with his presentations of "Turn to the
Ritfht/* M 1 j^htninY* "Thank You/* and so on.

After a while Barmuore's enthusiasm for the flat sub-
sided notieeabK, and with the coming of the summer
we abandoned our arrangement. We were the only the-
atrical menace in the building, so I doubt if we could
have maintained our occupation much longer, because
during our last month there I heart! the colonel, whose
point of view old Sarah understood perfectly, tell her
to ask the lady on the floor above what the devil she
meant by moving furniture around at eleven o'clock in
the morning. Tin* colonel seldom slept more than six
hours, at that. He wrote his plays from books of the
vintage of the "Drsrrted Village." They were pitiably
short, but filled with long soliloquies, and all of them
written for Barry more. Barry more listening to one of
these, and looking to me for help would have been an

jus pomposity, ctiiu a, iiicuioci ity uiai. YYCUJL£UJLLCU.
tion, carried Alfriend about with him in many leisui
hours. One of Barry's gentle friends wishing to embroid<
a sofa pillow, a Penelope activity then not fallen into nej
lect, asked me to draw in outline on a square of silk
profile of herself and one of Barrymore. After I ha
drawn her own profile I said: "How close to that do yc
want the profile of Barry ?"

The lady said: "About as close as Alfriend is to Pa
mer."

Barrymore introduced the colonel to me and insists
on my sharing for the new acquaintance his own enthi
siasm. Later Barry found a furnished flat, fourth floo
on Thirty-fourth Street between Seventh and Eighl
avenues, with three bedrooms, a little parlor, dinin;
room, and kitchen. The tenant wanted to sublet
furnished for forty dollars a month. Barrymore thougl
it would be an ideal arrangement if we three — he, tl
colonel, and I — should take this flat and live there. V
entered upon its occupation. A rotund, matronly n
gress, the janitress for the building, did the housewo:
and prepared our breakfasts. Other meals we took ou
side. I don't remember a happier period*

When the spring came and the fish were running
thick in the North River that one could buy a five-poui
shad with roe for thirty-five cents, General George She
dan, having sent old Sarah word the night before, won
appear in time with such a fish in a brown paper; ai
as Sarah, under his instructions, prepared it and put
on the breakfast table he would discourse upon it ai

11UUI/, JLLJl YYJLUX-JUL JUHd.lJ.Up 11CIU. U1CU.. JL JLC VY £U> Ctil lJLIU.UbtlJ.UUC>

person, and went early to his business. Alone in the
club, down-hearted for important personal reasons that
must not take attention here, each morning as I reached
Miley's room I was greeted by a formal, complimentary
little laugh from the parrot. It was my custom to push
the door farther open, speak to the bird, and sometimes
sit on the bed and invite his specialty. That little formal
laugh of his, encouraged by my echo, voluntary only at
first, would grow in volume and expand in character
until it revived somewhat of all the merry and maybe
dissolute hours of exhilarated companionship that Miley's
trade and temperament had won; laughs of a superior
clientele, but punctuated occasionally by guffaws of
chance and cheaper acquaintances, and by concerted
crescendo effects spraying into broken vocables as some
falsetto, tearful enthusiast regurgled the point of the
story. I was a poor amateur compared to Polly, but
together we could fill all the windows on both sides of
Twenty-sixth Street with matrons and housemaids, sym-
pathetically agrin and curious as to the disorderly con-
vocation at The Lambs. It was a great way to start
the forenoon, and required several unpleasant letters of
efficiency experts to dissipate Polly's fiat sunshine.

In the spring of that year the reputation of "The Bur-
glar" on the road and "A Man of the World" at the
Madison Square Theatre had influenced Mr. Palmer to
ask me to become connected with that fine playhouse.
Dion Boucicault was then under a regular retainer to
patch or adapt for Mr. Palmer any imported play that

preaching us with menace in every lineament.

When we met him he said: "See here, what d
fellows mean by sicking the colonel onto me?"

After leaving the Thirty-fourth Street flat whic
three men had leased I roomed at The Lambs Club
I left it to take an apartment with my wife at a
The sojourn at The Lambs was rich in experiences '
would fill a volume of small talk, smaller even thar
One item that, notwithstanding its diminutive p]
tions, I feel justified in describing, was of a parrot,
rot stories do not amuse me, because as a rule so pal
invented; but as Maeterlinck has written some
ciation between happiness and the bluebird, I wi
of this green one's occasional power.

The club at this period was not prosperous; ii
quite the contrary, and the newly organized Playei
begun to draw from it many of its best members,
only other permanent lodger in the house in that 1
1890 was the owner of this parrot, John B. MI
graduate of Dublin University. Mr. Miley's bu
was to sell wholesale, on commission, fine liquors ha
at that time by the old-established house of Roo
& Schuyler. Miley was proud of his business and
wares, and as self-respecting as if a discerning mo
had just given him the knighthood recently con
upon an eminent English distiller. The parrot had
with him in many years of convivial associations
may be inferred, but it had learned nothing der
izing — no profanity, no greetings, no call for biscuit!

there will appear in contrast lines ol a lighter gray. 1 hese
lines are not fixed. They move. At times, when they
take on resemblance to a face, imagination running just
a little ahead of the vision will muster them into propor-
tions of perfect drawing, and memory can manage them
into portraits. It is a fact in pathology that under fever
nearly everybody sees these shapes. In drowsy daylight
figures of the wall-paper grow fantastic, move, and have
expression. In his most excited moments, Martin Luther,
it will be remembered, could not banish the image of the
devil from the wall of his cell, and there used to be shown
a spot where he had thrown his inkwell at this negative
invocation, become objective.

After the production of "Reckless Temple/' and some
attendant dissipations and demands upon me physically,
and when I was in a run-down condition, this faculty
of such seeing was feverishly augmented. Under the
doctor's orders I had resumed strictly regular hours, not
the easiest recovery in The Lambs. One night before
the club was completely quiet I was trying to go to
sleep in the dark. At the piano down-stairs E. M. Hol-
land was playing a melody, then popular, called "Down
on the Farm." These lines in the dark of which I have
written assembled into definite shape, and I could see
before me more plainly than many a stage set shows in
theatrical light two posts of a ruined gateway, one stand-
ing, the other fallen, crumbled. I recognized the picture
as of a gateway I had seen in Talladega some six years
before, but had not consciously thought of since. As I
looked at it with some amusement an old man walked

ivir. JT aimer oiiereu me tne ooucicauii uesK ai
of fifty dollars a week the year round. He had i
ing Boucicault one hundred, and told me I co\
the theatrical custom and say outside I was g<
same; but that never became necessary. It v
lated that I was at liberty to produce "Reckless
and "The Correspondent/' which J. M. Hill hi
tively for Barrymore and Sidney Drew. This
Square engagement was a substantial addition t
was good publicity, and a fine business addres
then thirty-three years old.

I wrote at Mr. Palmer's request "A Cons
Point" for Mrs. Booth, who needed a one-act p
Palmer thought the public wouldn't under
Eighteen years later I expanded it to four acts a
it "The Witching Hour." For Mrs. Booth's i
need I wrote another one-act play called
thoughts/* which she did successfully.

"Reckless Temple" did not succeed in New 1
after sixteen weeks on the road Barrymore a
to Palmer's Madison Square Theatre, where, i
ing both those events, I was at work upon a ]
parts in it for all the company, including B*
About making that play there is in my opinio:
of some psychological as well as pathological ii

Men differ in degree, perhaps in kind, in their
mentally to see forms. My ability to draw ft
memory leads me to think that I have at least
age faculty. Sometimes in the dark, with no

were produced before we finally reached "Alabama."

Ed Holland liked the idea of the colonel written for
him, and as he and Woodruff already had some hint con-
cerning certain scenes in which they were together they
soon began to greet each other in Southern dialect and
manner. The membership of The Lambs, ignorant of
the reason for this assumption, but amused by it, caught
its contagion, and in a little while the club was apparently
an organi/;itiun of two hundred Southern colonels all
shooting culls and stinking phantom but magnificent
mustaches.

The play was finished under pressure in January and
read to the company on the stage. Prtsbrey, familiar
with it, was not of that group, but in his little office near
the entrance to the diev. ing-rooms.

As Mrs, Bonth Irft the theatre she leaned over the
closed lower half ut* Prrsbrev's Dutch door and whis-
pered to him, "Hotlm, thank \otil**

When we i cached irheuisals she declined to play the
part written jtir hn and it \\;i\ gi\en to May Brookyn,
from whom shr m Liimrd it shnztlv after the piece was
produced. Aft ft irhr-iiMng "Alabama" a werk Mr,
Palmer lost faith in it an* I leplarcd il with one of his*
KnglrJi p!a\s, This attack and retreat were n*pe*ated
twice, fiti! .iftrr thne hud been three Knglish failures
the* irheat'.il. *>J ** Al.iiniiiin1'1 in a spirit of desperation

^sdav, April it iHc.|i.
er I«*\i faith not only
nr tlark clay told me
that whrn the V«MI «*t nur contract endr<l, which would

\\rnt i

>?l IM |* , |

Hiiff^i

I inn

nn \\ r

In il

first' \ ,u *,

i 'i^( n*u

,..{,

Mr. Pa

in thr

plv, lint

in its

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any way to connect it with imagination,
association between Holland's tune, with its rural,
mental color, and this picture is fairly evident.

There was nothing unpleasant about this visio]
trusion, nor was there such persistence that I felt <
to Luther's protest. This little gateway and it
figures played somehow through my dreams, I
morning I found myself interested in the relations
the two people, partly trying to divine, but rather
ing with, their story. After a day or two the resu
a one-act sketch. This I had typed, and carried
Mr. Eugene Presbrey, stage-manager for Mr. P
Presbrey was enthusiastic about the little piece, bi
me it was a mistake to play it in that form. He ren
me that "The Burglar" had some of its New York
dulled by having first been done as a one-act pla;
insisted that I had in my possession the nucleus of
big story. He saw at once in the characters a pz
Stoddart and another for little Miss Agnes Millei
was the ingenue of the company at that time.
were other parts for Barrymore, Ned Bell, and
Woodruff.

Under Presbrey's encouragement, using the ske
a third act, I wrote the four-act play "Alabama."
fun with the Southern colonel in the piece, whom I
Colonel Moberly and whom I endowed with all tl
mality and pomposity of our Colonel Alfriend.
was a boy's part for Harry Woodruff, and a fat
for Charles L. Harris, the splendid comedian wh

(;AniF.iu\<; FLACKS OF THE ACTORS 293

m the f.riu- .nan .,,in • into hattle. On the first ni-ht

Ui.-i.".iM i,,,,u- u.i., auj.mmted I,y an ahuust panic

»'"';"' ;•> M«. l':tl.iin. Although quite unknown to

v!"..U mat nuuered, I smir<ht a fin ther obscurity by

mim>. !"lliit'! ;' I '"M in the j.aileiy. A similar t'imid

.iic nt the ..fu.l.m., acro-s the- aisle attracted my at-

'»«'•«. I\ «.»• Mr. Pal,,,,.,. Uhen the first curtain

««h ,MJM j.-.i lat, ,htrr am! applause, the must c!e-

i't}'' "•;••'•'•;_•' '•"injKt.u ran ask for, Mr. Palmer

f;"f a! .""•• }l!l 'u1'!"*. littrd in an iiujtiiry mixed

fl a .!• HI; ',MU ,».

'!'••"- '_'! Nji. IMnt. *i!I M-nu-iuhrr his regular fen-
<-- au«l uitrll.a <tl an.f .!i iij,, ,,| .{,,.,1 repression; also
.Ltl '•• l;-t!r '•' • He .1!.,, ha.l lather full ,jray s;tie
!'^" • (|<' '''•!'!- n..t vi uiu'MjiHuon then us sinee

it>li' i I ;t I; ••) nt the -, sf, ? \ i.i.Mi .

'Ilr ;• f " '4t3 ! «'"• '''^ ''!'•' 5' hi- v.hi'te laun tie, ami

{""!- "! ' ; '" •'•'/ -MJUJ..- i ini.-.J tin- uneuinfortahle

-•' >Ij"il "" ' ':i-r • i''-ni'j»tei! UIMHIIHIV i'unetitm. f-'otir

'''"^ '!1{ '';' »••''• t:«*i i'u ut.iMit in ulm-h the amlienee

t.tlm i'u, ','t'..!,-.i ..{u.ti ium ;Uf ^-.ave me courage

.•• IM ihe 3if!i . ,• I',, j far >r, un

^•S> ••'''!» '"»t »„,„• pnmomued n-spnnses after

I "^ ^ » * # 4 «

!* *lhs| *< '"i '>, t», if Mi. Piifftrr hatl also ventured
11 *'»J«**« I«-*<I, I fn*»"A ill i,itifioit In iltr winti mid
'•' I "* - ^ i, to rr ilir ir.i <*f ihis {irifurfiiiuicc fruin
,1.., .LJ ,.„.••

Msrn TJ.* ;i, 4* r , rfi tf trrrnrti in fur \v<* had In*<-n

!ir I11 ••""• -i t * •• ', itnl Mr. Palinrr was nut

t" ^'f .*« " ' !, i .'s thr flr-pir-, JMit uf the disftS-

l> r '', '«T' .T dr ff fr ihf t M?i/i»i!iil;if iuiis uf nuUlV

»-!• I • • ' . . ; , ..ttt-i. '

iy Hi!* *\ i I .*::', it I.-, i r.-jr- in mif fir^t apartment

IMi )'!T,J ",

, *> I

I I

CHARLES L. HARRIS AND E. M." HOLLAND AS SQUIRE TUCKER AND COLONEL
MOBERLY IN "ALABAMA."

294 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

in the old Oriental Hotel, opposite the Casino. As v
had to take an early train for Chicago, we agreed n<
to look at any of the papers until we should have had z
undisturbed breakfast and were alone together on tl
train, speeding from police detention. I gave her tl
paper in which I felt I would get the most considera
treatment, and took myself the one I believed most ho
tile. Its very head-lines disarmed me. I looked up ar
met an enthusiastic glow imparted by the notice she hs
read. We hurriedly went at the other papers. The pre
was unanimous. "Alabama" seemed the surprise of tl
season, and was characterized in terms almost too laud;
tory to refer to except by proxy.

In Chicago, as Willard's advance man, my calls <
the newspaper offices were exciting, owing to telegraph
reports about the New York first night, and the dramat
men were kind. But that day an ailment that had bee
threatening became acute, and I had to submit to a
operation under ether that put me in bed for the ne^
ten days. During that time the men on the Chica^
papers gave me all the help I could take. I was told th*
whatever I got to them concerning Willard would fir
space. Thus encouraged, I dictated to my wife lor
specials for each paper, which she carried to the office
and I doubt if any theatrical attraction ever went im
Chicago or any other American city with better publicil
than those generous fellows handed us.

Presbrey kept me informed of the play in New Yor
where it was doing capacity business, and the royall
checks made me think of the first time I had ever s;
in an overstuffed chair. We got the New York pape
every day; the ads and paragraphs were fine, and son
of the papers carried editorials about the play, inquirii

I GATHERING PLACES OF THE ACTORS 295

if New York managers had not made mistakes in leaning
on the imported article when native subjects seemed so
acceptable. And then in the midst of all of it came a
long telegram from Nat Goodwin asking me to write a
serious play for him, to choose my own subject, and offer-
ing a royalty of 10 per cent of the gross receipts, with an
advance of twenty-five hundred dollars. I agreed to do it.
I ^ With the Willard company Mr. Palmer came into the

V crty> delighted with conditions in New York and heartily

C approving all those he found in Chicago. I passed the

^ credit for the display to the men to whom it belonged,

especially to a young writer named Kirke La Shelle,
whom Mr. Palmer engaged that week to take the place
with the Willard company, which for sufficient reasons I
I was giving up. La Shelle later became a theatrical cap-

; tain, and produced for me "Arizona," "The Earl of Paw-

; tucket/' "The Bonnie Briar Bush," and "The Education

| of Mr. Pipp." Mr. Palmer asked me to forget his ter-

I minating our contract and to go on under the old ar-

j rangements for another year. He consented to my writ-

ing the play for Goodwin, which he expected from the
optional claims of our Madison Square agreement,
j , There were more checks from New York, and this

?- twenty-five hundred dollars from Goodwin. I was able,

, with a cane, to get about comfortably. I had been away

from St. Louis for twenty months. We went home to
see the folks. Crossing the Eads Bridge in the morning
>j I got to thinking of Whitlock, alias Jim Cummings, who

*** robbed the Missouri-Pacific express-car to cancel the

mortgage on his mother's home, and I felt ashamed of
myself. My mother then lived in a rented place. I didn't
tell her my inspiration, but we went together and picked
out a house.

_____SOME NOTABLE MANAGERS 297

called Silas Higgins, or something of that kind, and who
talked about nutmegs and apple-sauce. Mr. Palmer
asked me to make this character proper to its section
not only in name and in speech, but in view-point and
relation to the story. I wrote a character which I called
Colonel CaUjoun Booker. Mr. Palmer, at my sugges-
tion, engaged for the part Burr Mclntosh, at that time
about thirty years of age, fairly prominent in the Bo-
hemian life of New York, celebrated for his good nature
and his willingness to take chances, and for a pronounced
mimetic faculty. Palmer knew nothing of Mclntosh,
but I had heard him tell stories at the clubs and was sure
he had the foundation for the part. With Palmer's per-
mission I stressed Colonel Calhoun Booker's importance
in the play, feeling that its presentation would be a ballon
c/V.s\Vtti for "Alabama," which was to follow; and I be-
lieve that the success of Mclntosh helped determine
Mr. Palmer to go through with it.

"Needham's Double" was one of those plays of dual
personality, resembling in kind "The Lyons Mail/' It
was invented and unlikely, and on the first night in New
York Mclntosh, with his breezy manner and his welcome
Southern geniality, would have walked away with the
honors if the opposition had not been a star in large type.
He played the part during its short run and left it to
do Co/cmt/ Mohcrly in the second company of "Alabama."

After the original "Alabama" company played its
New York and Chicago engagements, and before it re-
opened at Palmer's in the fall of i8<)2, it went to Louis-
ville. Mr. Palmer asked me to go there and look over
the performance. The Louisville engagement was in the
fine old playhouse belonging to the Macauleys, so dear
to me in memory of Johnny Norton and the more recent

CHAPTER XVII
SOME NOTABLE MANAGERS

In the middle of April, 1891, after Mr. E. S. Willard,
for whom I was serving as publicity man, opened his
mid- Western tour in Chicago as Cyrus Blenkarn in Henry
Arthur Jones' play "The Middleman/' with Marie Bur-
roughs as his featured support, my wife and I went to
St. Louis, and afterward to the Minnesota lakes and the
Northwest. We returned to Chicago in the middle of
May to see the Western opening of my play, "Alabama/'
which had been forced out of New York by a summer
sublease of the Madison Square Theatre. My father
and mother came from St. Louis to see that first night
and visit us a few days in Chicago, where I tramped over
the crowded down-town streets with father hunting land-
marks of the small town he had known as a printer and
medical student in his youth. The first week in June
the parents went back to St. Louis and my wife and I
returned to New York.

Under my arrangements with Mr. Palmer I had re-
written parts of "John Needham's Double/' a play by
the English author, Mr. Joseph Hatton, produced Feb-
ruary 4, 1891, by Willard at Palmer's Theatre. This re-
write was after I had completed "Alabama," but before
that play was produced. An account of it in this place
is a little out of such time order as I have attempted,
but not enough to make the dislocation jar. Hatton had
put into his play a supposedly Southern colonel whom he

296

wren to-aay s number, were few, their triumphs
not numerous; but in the '8o's there had been some not-
able successes with American subjects: Florence had
played Woolfs "The Mighty Dollar" to extraordinary
business; Curtis had had success with "Samuel of
Posen"; Raymond had made a fortune with Colonel
Sellers in Mark Twain's "Gilded Age"; Denman Thomp-
son, under the encouragement of his manager, J. M.
Hill, had elaborated a vaudeville sketch into "The Old
Homestead." Concurrently with these American plays
on the road was a cycle of big productions of English
melodrama like "Romany Rye," "The Silver King,"
"The World," "Hoodman Blind," "Lights o' London,"
and the like, the exploitation of which throughout the
country had developed a school of publicity men who
knew accurately what part skilful press work played in
all these successes. They also had a thorough knowledge
of the respective values of the patronage to be obtained
in the various cities. This experience and this knowledge
had come along together with the rapid growth of the
country upon which both depended, and while the older
managers, content with their local triumphs in New York
and Boston, gave their attention to those centres, these
lesser agents and the publicity men referred to were wide-
awake to the value of the road.

Just back of Palmer's Theatre, both formerly and
later Wallack's, on Thirtieth Street, in the basement of
what had been a dwelling-house, was the office of Jeffer-
son, Klaw, and Erlanger. The Jefferson of this firm was
Charles Jefferson, eldest son of Joseph Jefferson. Klaw

aided by those Kentuckians who have the Southern in-
stinct amounting to genius for hospitality and enter-
tainment. At an effective moment in the evening he got
the attention of the party — close on to a hundred men,
I should say — and with his arm through mine in the
centre of the floor explained the circumstances under
which our acquaintance had been made, and claimed to
be proud that I was a product of a newspaper office.

Then shifting his arm over my shoulder, a habit he
had with any younger fellow he thought it would help,
and reverting to the play, the subject of which was the
reconciliation of the two great political sections of the
country, he said: "This boy has done in one night in
the theatre what I endeavored to do in twenty years of
editorial writing.5*

No half-way measures about wonderful Henry Watter-
son, gone since I last wrote of him in these chapters.

With the opening of Palmer's at this time, the little
Madison Square Theatre passed into the control of
Messrs. Hoyt and Thomas. Charles Hoyt was the au-
thor of a line of comedies as distinct in their kind and
for their day as the George Cohan plays are three decades
later.

There was in the business department of the theatre
of America at that time a relationship of forces worthy
of comment here. Those forces were then functioning
principally in New York. Although perhaps traceable
to more remote origins, they focussed and funneled
through the chanels of publicity.

play was as yet untried; that other theatres as suitable
as the Matiisi.ni Square could be got for it in the eity, and
that Miss Morton had no right other than the most tech-
meal one, and none whatever in justice, to impair Mr.
Palmer's property by forcing it out of a theatre where
tt had such momentum. As a matter of fact, the new
partners were right. Miss Morton's manager would
have benefited rather than have lost by some financial
accommodation that would have deferred their premiere.
"The Merchant" was produced in warm weather and
was not successful.

Charles Frohman knew nearly all the men then play-
ing in the American theatre. He had travelled with
Huverly's and Callender's Minstrels, with modest ven-
tures of his own; he was a most approachable and hu-
man person, and with his little office* just one flight of
stairs up from the Broadway sidewalk, where anybody
entered without knocking in those days, his acquaintance
and his popularity rapidly grew. After "Shenandoah"1
he acquired a lease of the Twenty-third Street Theatre,
between Sixth and Seventh avenues, and produced "Men
and Women," by Belaseo and De Mille, on the model of
the plays they were then supplying the Lyceum. This
was fallowed by other dramas and a string of farces* pro-
vided by the skilfully original as well as adapting pen of
William Gillette. This success built for him the still
beautiful Kmpire Theatre at Broadway and I'Wtieth
Street, which he opened with Belaseo's line melodrama,
"The Gii I I Left Behind Me/* in which Frank Morduunt,
William Morris, Theodore Roberts, and others appeared
with the boy actor, Wallie Edclinger, as Dick.

rear room, Charles Frohman had his first office under h
own name. He was another of these men.

Erlanger's genius was of the synthetic kind; he ha
the faculty of combination. Very rapidly, under h
activity, there was built up the first big syndicate (
American theatres controlling the best time on the roac
Charles Frohman's vision was the supplementing one c
producer. He also knew the country, the tastes of th
people, and had an uncanny flair for what would be a<
ceptable. But both men, and lesser ones with whor
they were associated, approached the whole theatric£
question along the lines of availability and salesman
ship. What were the things for which there was a mai
ket, and how rapidly could the public interest in ther
be created, stimulated, and expanded? These two set
of managers, the Palmer-Daly-Daniel Frohman groui
on one side, and the Charles Frohman-Hayman-Erlange
group on the other, approached the business from entirel;
different points and with entirely different methods. Ai
example of approach and method is furnished by "Ala
bama." When that play was produced in April, 1891
there was ahead of it in the Madison Square Theatn
but four weeks. After that time Mr. Palmer had rentec
his theatre for Martha Morton's play, "The Merchant/
and although "Alabama" immediately played to ca
pacity and would have rapidly restored the failing for
tunes of Mr. Palmer, it never occurred to him to depar
from the arrangement made to sublet his theatre. Tc
get ready money, he was therefore obliged to sell a hal

302

THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Clay M. Greene, in a burlesque of that play, had the
_ Jonel in agony, reading news of an injury to Irttle^Dicfe,
hand the telegraph tape to the major and say: "Take
it. I must get back."

"Back where?"

"To the centre of the stage/'

FII talk about me.

We were friends, Charles Frohman and I, from our
first meeting in 1882 until he was lost on the Lusitania
•m I9! 5— thirty-three years. After 1892 he produced
nine plays of mine — "Surrender/' "Colorado," "The
Man Upstairs/5 "The Other Girl/' "Mrs. LeffingweH's
Boots," "De Lancey," "On the Quiet/' "The Harvest
Moon/' and "Indian Summer," and five others which
I had rewritten but did not sign. I don't remember that
we ever signed a contract, and I am sure that we never
had a difference. He was among the first men upon whom
I called when I first came to New York to go with the
Marlowe company, and when I returned with the thought-
reader Bishop. He was the first manager to ask me for a
play after my coming to the city. I wrote for him many
bits not mentioned above. These little things were often
written in his presence as he pushed a piece of paper
across the desk when a subject came up in some related
talk. He had a fashion of doing that with other play-
wrights— Gillette, or Fitch, or Carleton — and it was great
fun to give him some bit for one of his girl stars and hear
him say, "That will go in to-night."

There was never any talk of remuneration for these
little things, as the burden of obligation, if obligation
existed, was always so heavily on the other side for the
hundreds of little courtesies that he found one way or
another of extending. Charles Frohman had a fine dra-

-I 4*»l I «!«?./ c,!/ I n/«vfj\'/;f /»'; jhtttic! }' mltntttn ,

SOME NOTABLE MANAGERS 303

matic sense, and without attempting exactly imitation
had the mimetic faculty that suggested the object of
his protrait quite as definitely. Men amused him much,
and when he told of his last visitor the interview was
likely to be vividly dramatized. I remember a report
of a visit of Colonel Alfriend, the Southern author of
whom I have written.

C. F., with his irresistible twinkle, said, "The colonel
was here to see me," and then without another word
there was the pantomime of the high hat laid carefully
on the table, one finger after another of one glove care-
fully withdrawn, then the entire glove straightened out
and laid across the hat; the same treatment for the other
hand; the silk- faced overcoat carefully taken off, shaken
out at the collar, folded, laid over the back of the chair;
the button of the surtout carefully adjusted at the waist;
mustaches stroked, and the victim transfixed with a
steady and piercing gaze. The scenario of a play was
drawn from one inside breast-pocket.

But C. F., in propria, interrupted — "I am going to
do a play by J. M. Barrie for Miss Adams. If you had
brought me in something for Miller "

Then C. F. was stopped; another scenario came from
the other inside pocket. This was not exactly the kind
of story that was wanted. Then, still as the colonel,
C. F. put one hand over his head like the legendary Wes-
terner getting a bowie knife, and drew a third phantom
scenario from the back of his coat collar, this last gesture
burlesque, but so in character that it was impossible to
find the line dividing it from preceding comedy.

Charles Frohman had a bit of philosophy that he car-
ried through life. He had learned that existence was
supportable if he had one real laugh in the day. Among

304 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

men interested in art and the theatre as connoisseur
patrons the wisest that I know is Mr. Thomas B. C
I was at a loss to comprehend his standard of exce
in the drama until I heard him say one time tha~
play which for two consecutive seconds made hin
get himself, made the playhouse disappear and hi
feel that he was in the presence of a real event, w*
him a notable play. He said:

"One seldom gets from a studio a canvas of un
excellence throughout. There will be one feature
better than the others. I can prize it for that fe;
And if I get a play with the scene I have indicated
three or four times when the scene is on to get the
pleasure from it that I get from the excellent note
painting."

C. F. seemed to apply an equal theory to relas
and the day's conduct. The thing that amused hi
would write upon a blotting-pad, and recover some
of its joy by telling it to many a subsequent visitor,
ing the rehearsals of "The Other Girl" referred
previous chapters we had on our third or fourtl
reached the first repetition of the second act. I w
the stage with manuscript and a blue pencil, the
pany standing about, slowly marking positions o:
parts, when C F/s office-boy came with an en\
carrying across its back the well-known blue disp]
Maude Adams' name. As the boy waited for an a:
the rehearsal stopped long enough for me to rea
sheet inside.

It carried in large and hurried handwriting, in cc
crayon, "How are you getting along at rehearsals
out me?"

Taking the inquiry at its face value from a busy

SOME NOTABLE MANAGERS

305

I wrote across the note one word, "Great," handed it
to the boy, and forgot it. Two days later I stopped in
at the office for some necessary conference. His letter
with my comment was pinned on the wall.

He said: "That furnished me laughs for two days.
I showed it to everybody."

^ He was also a practical joker, and would go to con-
siderable lengths, but never with any of the cruelty or
lack of consideration that practical jokes sometimes
breed. When "Alabama" went on its second visit to
Chicago he was interested in the management.

He^said: "Til bet you that it'll do a bigger business
than it did the first time."

As it was to be in the same house and we had played
to capacity the first time, I didn't see how that could
be, and said so. He wanted to bet, nevertheless, and
rejecting cigars and hats as stakes he fixed upon a suit
of clothes. I demurred, feeling that it was unsportsman-
like to bet on a sure thing. He generously gave me that
advantage, however. The business on the second trip
was nearly double, because of the fact, of which C. F.
was aware, and I not when he made the bet, that the
play had been chosen for the local police benefit and all
patrolmen of Chicago were selling tickets. The increased
royalties reconciled me to the loss of the bet. The bill
for the suit of clothes came in with C. F/s indorsement.
The price, one hundred dollars, amused him greatly.
We must remember that back in 1892 fifty or sixty dol-
lars was a fair sum for a suit of clothes. C. F. was fond
of telling all this when he had me and some other man
in his office.

Considerably later he was to open with a new play,
the name of which did not please him. On his blotter

306 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

he had a half-dozen alternative titles suggested by per-
sons who had called during the day. The man who gave
the winning title was to get a suit of clothes. He told
me the story. I suggested "Never Again/5 which C F.
wrote on the blotter and said would be taken under con-
sideration. My wife and I dined down town that night
and went to a play. As we were coming up town to the
Grand Central Station all of the exposed ash-barrels,
boxes, and temporary scaffolds were being covered with
snipe advertising of "Never Again." I went to an ex-
pensive firm and ordered their best suit; the price was
one hundred dollars. I asked them if there wasn't some
way to increase it, and after fastidious additions induced
them to boost it to one hundred and fifteen. C. F. added
that to his story.

With the success of "Alabama" the continued avidity
of the public for the Southern type drew Mr. Palmer's at-
tention to " Colonel Carter/' by Francis Hopkinson Smith.
The story, which had appeared in one of the magazines,
was already in book form and was probably a best seller;
one heard of it everywhere. I had carte blanche as to
material, but felt a little overawed by the popularity of
the book and the authority of its author. The play was
only mildly successful, but it marked a very notable
date in my own affairs, a friendship with that man of
such extraordinary versatility, Hop Smith, as his friends
called him, that lasted until his death in 1915. I have at
hand no scrap-book to spring upon the defenseless reader,
but I think it an act of simple justice to the author of
the book to quote from "The Wallet of Time," by Wil-
liam Winter, America's greatest critic of the theatre:

"Coming as it did at a time when the stage was being
freely used for the dissection of turpitude and disease,

SOME NOTABLE MANAGERS 307

that play came like a breeze from the pine-woods in a
morning of spring." And of the wonderful artist, dear
Ned Holland, he writes: "His success was decisive. The
GJemt'I -with his remarkable black coat that could be
adjusted for all occasions by a judicious manipulation
of the buttons, his frayed wristbands, his shining trou-
sers, his unconsciously forlorn poverty, and his unquench-
able spirit of hope, love, and honor— was, in that remark-
able performance, a picturesque, lovable reality."

With the production of "Carter" completed, and with
plavs for Goodwin, Crane, and Charles Frohman to write,
1 ended my connection with Mr. Palmer and turned to
the wider field. Mr. Palmer had about decided to aban-
don management anyway, although, with his caution
over any considered step, he did not do so for two years.

During those* two years he produced "Trilby" at the
Garden Theatre and one or two plays at his own house,
in which the bru.utiful Maxine Elliott made her first ap-
pearance, Mr. Palmer, who had been a public librarian
in his youth, was the most eulttvated manager I knew
personally -1 never met Augustm Daly. But Mr. Pal-
mer's culture made him timid in a business that was fast
olierinn premiums for adventure. I remember the melan-
choly of the man in his gradual retirement, as during
that' period he said to me: "I'm an old man"— he was
considerably under sixty at the time— "and I cannot
eompete with these younger men who are coming into
the field." lie named particularly Charles Frohman and
Mr. Krlan^er,

It would he of interest to remember the kind of world
in which we then were living in that period beginning in
iKc>2 and covering the next five years of which I now
write. The President of the United States was Grover

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CHAPTER XVIII
THE EARLY DO'S

Thomas P. Gilroy was mayor of New York City; the
community \vas busy discussing rapid transit and the
prospect for a first subway, for which it seemed Impos-
sible to borrow money. There was a great stir in mu-
nicipal consciousness all over the country. L. S. Ellert
hud just been elected mayor of San Francisco on an inde-
pendent ticket and a promise to give clean business as
opposed to the sand-lot variety of politics. Mayor Pin-
gree, of Detroit, had won on a campaign for city lighting.
Mayor William Henry Eustace of Minneapolis was clos-
ing u business administration, and although contracts
with the lighting companies had five years to run, Min-
nt'upulis was resolving at the termination of that time to
have her own electric plants, Chicago was hoping to
elect Mayor Harrison in order to have his direction dur-
ing the period of the World's Fair. And Nathan Mat-
thews, mayor of Boston, had been elected on a ticket
for municipal lighting and an extension of the transit,

For the season of Vji "02 my wife and 1 had resumed
possession of our apartment on the upper floor of the
Oriental Hotel on the Thirty-ninth Street side, overlook-
ing the roof of the Casino. In the summer and early
autumn evenings we could sit at the window or on the
little lire-escape balcony thereby and see the operatic
performance on the Casino roof as comfortably as if from
a private box, though a bit remote. Part of our royul-

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THE EARLY 9Q*S

Persons intm-sted in play-writing— and I am per-
suadrd they an* not Few in number— will see how that
dears tlu^utmosphere. When you must or may write
fur a Mar it i . a big start to have the character agreeably
ami tlrimiirlv chosen. To secure the love interest, I
thought of a jiiri who would be of a little finer strain than
the siu'iitf Upr indicated, and the necessity for conflict
suggested a rival. The rival should be attractive but
unworthy, and to make him doubly opposed to Good-
win, 1 dtriiird to have him an outlaw, some one it would
lie the sheriffs duty and business—business used in the
stage sense in arrest.

I have told in earlier chapters of my experience with
Jim Cumminjjs, tin* express robber, who had given a
messenger on the Missouri-Pacific road a forged order to
carry him in his car, and then after some friendly inter-
course* had tied the messenger and got olf the train with
a suitcase full of greenbacks. The need for a drama
criminal decided me to make use of Cummings as Good-
win^ rival, a glorified and beautiful matinee Cummings,
but substantially him. This adoption rescued the sheriff
and the girl from the hazy geography of the mining-
camps in which my mind had been groping and fixed
the trio in Mi//oura.

Newspaper experience in those days before the flimsy
and the rewrite* emphasi/ecl the value of going to the place
in order to re-port an occurrence, and I knew that, aside
from I first* tht'rc characters and their official and senti-
mental relationship, the rest of my people and my play
were waiting for me in Bowling Green, Mi'/y.oura. I
told (looduin of the character and the locality, got his
approval of the idea that far, and took a train for Pike
County.

liz 'nil: PRINT Oh' MY KKMI'.MIWANCK

In tl<o,r da\s Mrs. Ti .MM a'id I asrJ to ho'd hands
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THE EARLY 9Q'S 313

the only passengers except a man who sat well forward
by the heater and seemed in trouble. When the con-
ductor, whom I knew, came along I asked him about
the man. lie said: "That's Nat Dryden. You must
know him/*

1 did. I went forward to Dryden's seat, lie was weep-
ing and muttering to himself, though slightly consoled
by liquor.

When I spoke to him ho turned to me for sympathy
and said: "Oh, (Ins, (Jus\ Nancy died last night/1

Nancy was his wife, and was known as one of the hand-
somest \\omen in Missouri.

"Yes, last ni*'ht ! And, oh, (Jus, how she loved you!"

41 Why, I don't think I ever met your wife."

"1 know it. But you remember that convention at
Jefferson City when I was a candidate for attorney-gen-
eral

I nodded,

"The fourth ballot was a tie between me and that
blankety-blank-blank from Galloway County. You were
at the reporters' table. At a pause in the proceedings
you rose from your impotent and inopportune seat, and
addressing that eonvention in which you had no rights
\\hntever you said in u loud voice: 'I want it distinctly

understood that the press of this State is for Nat Dry-

a# **
en.

I nodded.

44 Dear boy, it beat me. But I went home and told it
to Nuney, and we've loved you ever since/'

My wife and I stopped only a day in St. Louis, and
then 'we started back for New York. There are few better
places than a railroad train for building stories. The
rhvthmic click of the wheels past the fishplates makes

of my contending people. But that is a relief that must
be deferred. Like overanxious litigants, the characters
are disposed to talk too much and must be controlled
and kept in bounds by a proportioned scenario, assign-
ing order and respective and progressive values to them.

Before beginning to write I submitted the story to
Goodwin. He was playing at the Fifth Avenue Theatre
at the time, I think, in Henry Guy Carleton's "Ambi-
tion," but I am positive about his rooms at the Worth
House annex of the Hoffman House just across Twenty-
fifth Street. I called by appointment at twelve o'clock.
Nat had been a little wild the night before, and was now
propped repentantly against his pillows. As I entered
the room a German waiter was standing at the foot of
the bed with an order blank in his hand. Nat was study-
ing the menu with a most regretful discrimination.
Faintly assuming my permission, he gave his order, the
obsequious German responding and writing down.

"Bring me a wine-glass of orange juice/'

"Vine-glass, oranch juice/'

"Dry toast/'

"Jez-sir, try doast."

"Piece of salt mackerel."

The waiter answered and wrote. Long pause by Nat.

"Cup of coffee."

"Coffee, jez-sir."

"Curtain."

Following Nat's appealing look, I explained to the
puzzled waiter the significance of the last instruction.

Goodwin was so enthusiastic about the story that it

THE EARLY 90'S 315

was an added stimulation to the writing of it. I got a
little inside room near our apartment in the Oriental
and began work on the play, which as far as dialogue
went almost wrote itself. One night in particular, after
talking in minute detail the third act to Goodwin, really
playing it with him, I went to my table after an early
and light dinner, but with some coffee that I had the
bell-boy bring at irregular times, and other reinforce-
ments not so deadly, and wrote the entire third act of
the play before the daylight came through the windows.
I was a good deal of a wreck when it was finished, and
the handwriting was difficult to read; but when finally
transcribed it was never altered, and the play could be
prompted from that script to-day.

Early in the World's Fair time there came a chance
to do the play at Hooley's. Goodwin had a fine com-
pany, somewhat miscast in some particulars, but all of
ability, with handsome Frank Carlyle as the villain and
a tower of strength in Mclntosh, whom I persuaded
Goodwin to take when he had been rather set on getting
McKee Rankin, a much more expensive and older actor.
We had exactly eleven days in which to produce the
piece. It was one of Goodwin's greatest first nights. I
had frequently been behind the curtain with Nat in other
plays, but never saw him begin one. That night in Chi-
cago he had a perfect case of seasickness, and with diffi-
culty controlled his nausea during the acts. He told
me then that his nervousness always affected him that
way with a new play.

I shall never forget his pale face nor his descriptive
line as during one of the intermissions he looked up at
me and said: "My boy, a first night is a hoss race that
lasts three hours."

Senator/' and looking about for a play to follow it.
Crane some years before had had a play by Clay M.
Greene. called "Sharps and Flats/' in which he and Rob-
son had jointly starred, and Greene had rewritten for
Robson and Crane some other script. Joseph Brooks,
Crane's manager, wished Greene and me to write to-
gether. It was arranged that Greene and I meet Crane
at his summer home, Cohasset. Greene was to be in that
neighborhood with a yachting party. My wife and I
planned to stop on our way to Ocean Point, Boothbay
Harbor, Maine, where Mr. Eugene Presbrey and his
wife, Annie Russell, had a bungalow, to which they had
invited us for part of the summer.

At Mr. Crane's home I found a request from Greene
for Crane and me to come to Boston, where a yacht on
which Greene was a guest was anchored. This was agree-
able, as Crane had his own steam yacht, the Senator,
and was in the habit of running up to Boston once or
twice a week on excuses not nearly so good. Greene's
host was Harry M. Gillig, owner of the schooner yacht
Ramona. The Senator anchored near by and our party
went aboard the Ramona, where, with Harry Gillig play-
ing a taropatch and Frank Unger strumming a banjo,
the distinguished comedian showed the boys that he
could still shake a foot. Crane began professional life
as a basso in a comic opera company, and went from
that into Rice's burlesque, " Evangeline," in which as Le
Blanc he had not only to sing and act, but to dance. Be-
sides the jollity of it there was an amusing incongruity
in the sight of the sedate Senator in yachtsman's fa-

THE EARLY DO'S 317

tigue doing a rattling jig on the deck of the schooner.
After a jovial afternoon Crane went home alone to Co-
hnsset, and my wife and I joined the cabin party of the
sehooner yaeht tinder Gillig's promise to sail us up to
Prrshrev's, an easy cruise of two or three days.

Harry Gillig, Californian, had recently married a
daughter of a California multi-millionaire. This young
couple wrn* on their honeymoon. The Gillies had with
them a Western party, including, besides Mr. and Mrs.
Greene* I Tank Unger, father of Gladys linger, the young
playwright of to-day; Theodore Wonvs, painter; Charles
Warren Stodkiurd, poet, author of "South Sea Idyls";
Harry Woodruff, aetor; and Charles Thomas, partner of
Charles Hoyt, of the younger group of managers. Gillrg
and Unger, as members of the Bohemian Club, San Fran-
cisco, were also members of The Lambs, \\here I had met
them and lnrtun an intimate friendship that fasted as long
as both men lived,

By the time the Ramom* reached Boothbay Harbor,
Gillig and his eabin party were opposed to my wife and
rue* leaving for the visit to Presbrey. The amiable con-
test was adjusted by our spending a few days ashore
while the boat entisecl near by, and our then rejoining
for a run to Bar Harbor and back, when our host took
Presbrey aboard, too, for a sail back to New York. Any
cruise so composed and dowered can (ill pages with its
record, I shall not write a line, but will leave all to sym-
pathetic understanding under the embracing words of
youth arid fellowship, sail and song and sea, and summer.

It would be with the greatest regret that I would elimi-
nate* from my t-xperienees that summer and parts of two
subsequent ones on the Rnmtma, and yet 1 think that
nearly all the embarrassment that comes from having

strawberries, as ivir. ivieivmc otuuc icmt^o, .^^c^ov, ^\,
feared they would spoil his taste for prunes; and then
we people of the theatre are so easily misled by appear-
ance, and also by a creative wish to realize a fancy. Only
three or four years ago I met Henry Miller in San Fran-
cisco, where, like myself, he had come to put on some
plays in that summer.

"Hello, Henry ! Why aren't you on a vacation after
your busy season at your New York theatre?"

"Because I was not content with a place in the coun-
try good enough for any man to live in, but being a damn
fool theatrical person had to build stone walls around
it, and terraces, and make a production. Now I'm still
working to pay for it.53

On the Ramona, Greene and I hammered out a story
we thought would do for Crane's play. It wasn't easy,
because Crane, like all the comedians at that time,
wanted a comedy-drama, something that would give
him a chance for the untried substantial powers he was
sure he possessed. With this story in hand we had a
season ahead of us in which to write the dialogue.

Although again getting a little out of the order of
events, for the sake of cohesion I will jump ahead to the
production of the Crane play which we called "For
Money." It was a four-act construction, and with a
dominant serious note. Crane played a man who had
been embittered by finding in his dead wife's locket,
which he had thought contained his own portrait, the
picture of another man. This unhappy discovery had
been made many years before the opening of our story,

THE EARLY 90'S 319

and the ingenue of the play, who had come under his
protection, speaking in pride of her antecedents, showed
to Crane a portrait of her father. The unhappy star
was to regard it and say in a quiet undertone to himself,
"The man whose picture I found on my dead wife's
bosom/'

Charles Thorne or John Mason or Lucien Guitry might
have got away with that line, but when Crane spoke it,
registering a startled surprise, and spreading his hands
in a manner that had been irresistible in the old-time
comedy of " Forbidden Fruit/' the house rocked with
laughter.

Greene said: "Some of 'em wanted to cheer for the
man in the picture."

The performance was in Cleveland, where Greene and
I had a few friends. Sympathetic people tried to restore
the equilibrium of the play by appreciating its other
serious values, but as Greene said at our little post-mor-
tem when the evening was over: "Yes, people came to
me in the lobby and said they liked it, but they didn't
slap me on the back/'

By the end of the week Brooks and I took blame for
our fall-down in equal shares. The play wasn't as good
as it might have been, and Crane didn't handle serious
stuff as well as he hoped he would.

I once made a caricature in my guest book of Francis
Wilson, under which Frank wrote, "Du sublime au ridi-
cule il n'y a qu'un pas, which some years later I was able
to translate. But the fact of the easy step from the sub-
lime to the ridculous I knew by experience. Two weeks
ahead Crane's time for his New York season at the Star
Theatre was waiting for him.

I said: "Joe, I think I can save the printing, the

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THE EARLY 90'S

321

Civil War to take a comedy view of some of its episodes,
and that after the many serious plays that had handled
it the public would be glad to have the subject treated
humorously. C. F. thought so too. He liked the script
as I gave it to him, and it was turned over to Eugene
Presbrey to rehearse in Boston. Presbrey was so ap-
preciative of its values that he thought it a mistake to
make a farce of it, and after a conference with C. F.,
who went over to look at the rehearsals, they decided
to play it seriously, stressing melodramatically every pos-
sible point and introducing a horse. When I arrived at
about the dress rehearsal the enthusiasm of those two
men overbore my first conception of the story, and we
went to the public with it as a serious play. It lasted
on the road only some sixteen weeks.

Maude Banks, the daughter of General Banks, was
playing in the piece the part of the only Northern girl.
A requirement of the script and of the part was a blue
silk sash on her white dress, as I remembered the young
women of war days declaring their loyalty. At the dress
rehearsal Miss Banks declined to destroy the effect of
her white dress by putting any color on it, preferring to
leave the company rather than be disloyal to her dress-
maker. C. F. said it was too late to do anything about
it, and the young lady's whim prevailed. I don't think
she ever played under Mr. Frohman's management again.

Louis Aldrich, a stalwart actor who as a star had won
great reputation in Bartley Campbell's "My Partner"
and other dramas, played a Southern general with a line
that I had taken verbatim from an assertion by Colonel
Alfriend that the South had whipped the North on a
thousand fields and had never lost except when over-
come by superior numbers. Aldrich declined to deliver

322 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

this speech, because personally he was a Northern man,
so that altogether we had considerable trouble with our
temperamental actors. There came a time in C. F/s
experience and development, however, when he was
somewhat more insistent on the effects that he wanted,
and when actors were not so ready to oppose him.

In the spring of 1892 we built at New Rochelle the
house which is still our home. The versatile, volatile
Sydney Rosenfeld at that time was among the first if
not actually the principal librettist of America, and a
writer of comedies. He had one or two successes on
Broadway, and he and I were very closely associated in
The Lambs. At his suggestion we went to New Rochelle
to find land on which to drive our stakes. For some
reason or other Sydney postponed his building and finally
abandoned the intention. I recall our first day's nego-
tiation with Sydney's friend from whom we hoped to
buy the land. Mr. Leo Bergholz, ever since that time
in the United States consular service, was showing us a
little pine thicket on his own land, densely grown, the
ground covered with fallen needles. He had a pretty
wit, but stood somewhat in awe of the great Rosenfeld,
who wrote smart dialogue for the Francis Wilson operas
and had also been an editor of Puck.

Commenting on the seclusion of this copse, Bergholz
said: "No ray of sunshine ever penetrates this gloomy
fastness/5

When neither of us smiled at this mediaeval utterance,
Bergholz repeated it. With some difficulty we continued
serious. As Bergholz approached it for the third time
he lifted his hands after the manner of a coryphee, and
dancing in most amateurish fashion a feeble jig, he said
again: "No ray of sunshine ever penetrates this gloomy
fastness."

THE EARLY 90'S

, looking solemnly at Leo's feet, remarked:

gloomiest f tness I ever sa

architect,

. drawn
ferences as

** believe that an essential feature ^ o to

Vture was a rooT that could be s^ en^

Barnes, the house .should .droop its wing

Weltered brood like a mo™er f £}

.ketch that I t

a.txd which my wife sti

oa the back of an envelope >** r

to our joint needs. When . **«

to New Rochelle to board m order to

prise. There was no hot^ JU* one of

m the place was kept by two elder Y

a Mrs. David whose ^husband had b ^ ^

merchant of that ^^^Fort Sfocuin, had been
David's Island, now occup^d by ^ andt

named. We were -a^^^n. I «ave them ^
inquired for ours. Witn nib p heard

name of Bronson Howard. They had

^ we wen
near tlie enter-

They had never heard of that.

was superseded by an experience of my own. In 1909
Mr. Shubert asked me to go to Chicago to overlook the
performance that the John Mason company were giving
in my play, "The Witching Hour/' at the Garrick Thea-
tre. I purposely stood in the lobby until the curtain had
gone up, and then in my most humorous manner asked
the man in the box-office if he passed the profession. The
lobby was filled with posters bearing Shubert's and
Mason's names, and my own, in that order of impor-
tance and display. The treasurer asked my name, the
branch of the profession in which I was. I told him.
He asked me the names of some plays I had written. I
named four or five, omitting "The Witching Hour/'
He said he would have to ask the manager. The man-
ager came to the box-office window, put me through the
same questionnaire, and shook his head; and it was only
when I told him how he would disappoint Mr. Shubert,
and pointed to the three-sheet bearing the name I had
.given him, that he in any way associated the sound with
the type.

At New Rochelle I became intimately acquainted with
Frederic Remington and E. W. Kemble. These two
illustrators had been friends for some time elsewhere,
and were great companions; but the most beautiful side
of their friendship needed a third for its precipitation.
Kemble is universally amusing when he cares to be. Few
men are his equal in putting the spirit of caricature into
ordinary verbal report or comment; even his famous
"Kemble Koons" do not show such sure fun. Reming-
ton responded promptly to Kemble* s comedy, however

THE EARLY 90'S

expressed. Most men who know it do the same, but
Remington went further. When Kemble had left him
after any interview, all of Kemble's woes of which Rem-
ington had been the repository were suddenly dwarfed
in the larger horizon of Remington's experiences and
transmuted into side-splitting jokes. In his mind, Kem-
ble was never grown up; and Kemble reciprocated.

Remington's throes, viewed through Kemble's prism,
were just as amusing. They took even each other's art
as playfellows take each other's games. There were
years when much of their leisure was passed in company.
Their understanding was mutual and immediate. One
night after the theatre, on the train home from New
York, sitting together, Remington was by the car win-
clow, Kemble next to the aisle. An obstreperous com-
muter was disturbing the passengers, men and women.
The busy conductor's admonition had been ineffective,
the brakeman's repeated expostulations useless. The
men passengers seemed cowed; the rowdy was gaming
confidence. On his third blatant parade through the
car, and as he passed Kemble's side, Remington's two
hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle reached
out into the aisle, and with the precision of a snapping
turtle lifted him from his feet like a naughty boy and
laid him face downward over Kemble's interposing lap.
With the spirit of perfect team-work, as Remington held
the ruffian, Kemble spanked him, while the legs in the
aisle wriggled frantically for a foothold. The correction,
prolonged and ample, was accompanied by roars of laugh-
ter from fifty other passengers. Being done, Remington
stood the offender on his feet. The man began a threat-
ening tirade. Before half a sentence was uttered Rem-
ington had him again exposed to Kemble s rhythmic

326 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

tattoo. This was enough, and when again release*
fellow promptly left the car for the seclusion o;
smoker.

In those early go's my sculptor friend Rucks
relation to life was not unlike my own. He was woi
in a department of art where there was no regulari
income, and where his opportunities were the rest
competition. Next to getting an order for a play
finding a story satisfactory to a star or manager
seeing RuckstuII win a commission in a compel
where his sketch had been approved. When he go
order for the Hartranft equestrian statue to go i
front of the Capitol at Harrisburg it made quite a
stir in our colony. Besides myself, both Remingtor
Kemble were artistically interested.

After one has submitted a sculptured model si
which is perhaps eighteen or twenty inches high
procedure toward the heroic group that is finally "
in bronze is through what is called a fourth-sized mo
say, for horse and man perhaps four feet high. I
stull decided to make his final clay model of the fin
group in France. Studio rent, plaster-casting, an<
final bronze, together with one's own living for the
that the work would require, would all be so :
cheaper that such a foreign residence, with some
of a holiday color to it, would about pay for itself,
fourth-sized model, however, he would make in this <
try, and for the fun that it would be for all of us ]
suaded him to put up a half shade on some open gi
back of our house at New Rochelle and do the
there.

Remington, a very methodic worker himself, d<
his ability to play in off hours, got up early, put

•r*wTi'v

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^kl1^

L. •

X <*•"

/*-.

THE EARLY 90'S 32?

entire forenoon, and with the interruption of a light lunch
worked until nmrly three o'clock. Then every day dur-
ing this stay of Ruekst all's Remington came over to look
at the progress of the model He once said that when
he died lie wanted to have written on his tomb: "He
knew the horse/* And that could be said of Remington
about as truthfully as of any other artist that has ever
lived In America. RuekstuII also knew the horse, but
from another angle. It was interesting to hear the dis-
putes of these two experts as RuekstuIFs horse pro-
grossed in its modelling, Remington always arguing for
the wire-drawn Western specimen and RuekstuII stand-
ing for the more monumental, picturesque horse of the
Eastern breeders.

During that time I went: to Remington's studio one
day, where he was drawing a Westerner shooting up a
barroom. That hulking figure in the foreground, how-
ever, obstructed other detail that he wished to show.
Remington immediately dusted off the charcoal outline,
and instead drew his gunman in the background shooting
down the room.

I said: 4I I'Yed, you're not a draftsman; you're a sculp-
tor. You saw all round that fellow, and could have put
him anywhere you wanted him. They call that the sculp-
tor's degree,* of vision/*

Remington laughed, but later RuekstuII sent him
some tools and a supply of modeler's wax, and he began
his €< Bronco Bust erf * It was characteristic of the man
that his first attempt should be a subject difficult enough
as a technical problem to have daunted a sculptor of
rxperienee and a master of teehnie. His love of the work
when he got at it, Ins marvellous aptitude for an art in
which he hud never had a single lesson, are some evidence

nu;

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THE EARLY 90'S

membrred so pleasantly Mr. HowcIIs' little comedies,
*4The Elevator;1 "The Garroters," "Register," and the
like, printed in 1884 and 1885 in Harper's. Slightly op-
posing Mr. Howard, I took the liberty of suggesting that
that might be the case.

Very definitely this veteran then asked me: "Thomas,
what is a dramatist?"

I answered: 4*A man who writes plays/'

"Exactly! What plays have these men written?"
Then reinforcing his position he told me that the capacity
to write plays invariably evinced itself in a disposition
to do so before middle life. When called upon to speak,
however, Mr. Howard took a sympathetic attitude to-
ward the venture and talked encouragingly. One other
speech that 1 remember in a general way is that of Mr.
Henry C. De Mille, father of the present De Mille boys
of dramatic and motion-picture fame. One line par-
ticularly had a considerable influence on my way of think-
ing. De Mille reported a proposition by Harper Brothers
that he should write for them a set of rules for play-
wrights.

He said: "I at first accepted the commission, but
later declined for the reason that I feared that if I once
formulated a set of rules for writing a play I might some
time be tempted to follow them."

It was about that time that Frederic Remington,
speaking of his own art, as illustrator and painter, said
to me: "Tommy, if I felt cocksure of anything about my
business I would begin to be afraid of myself."

The resolution of each of these experts to keep a per-
fectly open mind about the things they were doing went
far toward retarding my own ossification.

Mr. McDowell established his Theatre of Arts and

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THE EARLY 90'S 331

to ^ntcral laughter that almost closed the performance.
It is interesting at least to me, that out of this expensive
essay these somewhat technical points should be the
lasting impressions, and that all the fine literary offer-
ings intended tor the reformation of the theatre should
have so vanished.

In these early oo's Joseph Brooks conceived the idea
of having a play written with George Washington as the
central character. This was suggested by the resem-
blance between the portrait of Washington and that of
Joseph Holland, then at the height of his popularity as
an actor. Brooks's idea was to associate Joe and his older
brother Edmund. I undertook to write the play, and
mack* a fairly thorough study of Washington's life and
times. Avoiding the error of the biographical play which
tries to cover too much, I confined my story to the period
when Washington was a colonel of the Virginia militia,
and before he had married Martha Custis. I found a
character for Kd Holland in Virginia's Scotch governor,
Dinwiddie. When the play was done the professional
engagements of the two men did not allow them to under-
take it immediately, and before both were at liberty one
had fallen ill. The joint project was abandoned. Having
faith in the play, I wanted to see it tried, and for that
purpose went to Boston, where the Castle Square Stock
Company at that time had as leading man Jack Gilmour,
bearing considerable resemblance in face and figure to
the traditional Washington. This stock company played
a new play every week, having only live rehearsals in
which to prepare-
On our first night a young actor who was playing
Bryan /-air/ax, with two scenes in the first act, was not
at hand when we readied his second one. The usual

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THE EARLY 90'S 333

been two years at Harvard College under romantic con-
ditions. Harry had won the affections of a daughter of
a wealthy family whose members objected to an actor
as a husband for the young woman. They agreed, how-
ever, that if Woodruff would go through Harvard and
equip himself for another profession the objections would
be withdrawn. They also agreed to pay his way. While
Woodruff was at his studies the family took the young
girl abroad and, with a change of scene and her wider
opportunities, succeeded in arranging for her an alliance
with one of the nobility. With this accomplished, the
family had notified Woodruff that the financial support
they were giving him at the university would be with-
drawn. Harry was courageously making arrangements
to pay his own way through the remaining two years,
and regretting that he had not secretly married the girl,
as he had an opportunity to do.

This possible set of relations — a young man in college
secretly married and the family trying to marry his wife
to a foreign nobleman struck me as a pretty complica-
tion for a comedy. Having a contract with Goodwin
for something to follow "In Mi///,oura," I developed that
story into a three-act play which I called "Treadway of
Yale." Goodwin accepted both the scenario and the
finished script, but before the time came for production
he married Maxine Elliott, of whose dramatic ability he
had such high opinion that he thought the comedy gave
her insufficient chance. He therefore forfeited his ad-
vance payments on it and returned the script. It was
produced' some time later under the title of "On the
Quiet" by William Collier under the management of
Will Smythe, and later revived by Charles Frohman
when Collier passed under his direction. Collier went to

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TOE EARLY 90'S 335

African tom-tom in a red vest, made its appearance.
Ja//. was its offspring. Jazz is ragtime triumphant and
transfigured, the Congo arrived at kingdom come.

The nation's loot kept time. The two-step gave way to
the fox-trot and the shimmy came along with jazz. Cen-
tral Africa saw ghosts. Some moralist speaks of a cer-
tain ferocity in nature which, "as it had its inlet by
human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering."
Why may not jazz be the cutaneous eruption of the virus
of black slavery? If Davios and Vaughan are accurate
in their translation of Plato's " Republic" the idea is not
so novel as the inquiry, for therein Plato says:

44 The introduction of a new kind of music must be
shunned as imperilling the whole state, since styles of
music are never disturbed without affecting the most
important political institutions. The new style/' he
goes on, "gradually gaining a lodgment, quietly insinu-
ates itself into manners and customs; and from these it
issues in greater force, and makes its way into mutual
compacts; and from compacts it goes on to attack laws
and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, un-
til it ends by overturning everything, both in public and
in private*."

It might no doubt amuse Plato to take fifty years of
musical progression in America and check its changes
against our changing compacts, laws, and constitutions.

"But, say, this guy Plato— where docs he get that
eompax-ttmU'onstatution stuff? Who wised him to any-
thing about show business? An' lissun! This Davus
and Vaughan -words by, music by— I never ketch them
on no big time neither."

I;reclerie Remington, with a natural social philosopher's
view of them as they worked not only in the theatre but

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XIX
SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA

In preceding chapters, in trying to tell how I came
to go at the business of writing plays, to tell how my
attention was lee! in that direction and how information,
experience, and material for the work were gathered, I
have tried to use discrimination. This is probably not
apparent, but as I mentally review what I have con-
sidered the high lights of this irregular report I am con-
scinus of much that has been omitted.

For example, there were the facts and happenings
connected with making a play which was called "New
Blood/* and was produced by Mr. Joseph Brooks late in
the summer of 1:804. If this publication were political
in its character I might slam ahead and call a lot of people
a lot of names, because, fair-minded and unprejudiced
asM have tried to be, I iVar that I am a good deal par-
tisan. I have frankly told that as a young man I was a
Master Workman in the Knights of Labor. I deeply
sympathized with the working classes of the country,
to which I thought I belonged, and their problems be-
came my own as far its study and investigation went,
and also as far as I could express myself and be tolerated
as a member of one of the principal political parties. I
made speeches in all the presidential campaigns after I
became of ag<S and occasionally talked in local cam-
paigns in the congressional years.

It will1 be remembered that in the early go's two ab-
sorbing considerations in the country were the trusts

337

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SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 339

and depict came into collision. The most outstanding
figure <m the labor side was Mr. Eugene Debs, now, in
!()>:>, in the public eye because of his attitude during
the \\Wld War and his consequent incarceration at At-
lanta and his subsequent pardon from that place by
President Harding, In i8c)4 Mr. Debs had asked that
a difference of opinion between the Pullman Company
and the men working in the Pullman car shops at the
town of Pullman, near Chicago, should be submitted
to arbitration, Mr. George M. Pullman, the president,
who hud been a great benefactor, in that lie had built
a model city for his employees, was deeply hurt at what
he considered their ingratitude, and declined to discuss
arbitration. Writing in a maga/ine of his attitude at
that time, and the various patents the Government had
granted him, Doctor Albert Shaw said:

Mr, Pullman should certainly fed very good-natured, indeed,
toward a nation that has afforded him such unparalleled opportuni-
ties and has rewarded his talent, and energy with such colossal trib-
utes of wealth. „ . . To very many people it seemed clear that he
ought not to have allowed his local quarrel to go on unsettled and
unappeased until it had assumed continental proportions.

The same impartial writer condemned Mr. Debs for
extending the strike to the American railroad unions
and through them obstructing trains that: carried Mr.
Pullman's cars. When Mr. Debs did this he also stopped
trains on which there were* the United States mails, with
the* result that President Cleveland stepped into the situ-
ation, and when our *4New Blood" company approached
Chicago toward the end of July the train on which it
was ran through a district with miles of burning freight-
cars on either side and arrived in Chicago to find that

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__ SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 341

burst the new dress in a hurried adjustment, and a second
act was held several minutes while the modiste put in
a gore* The whole night took on a tone of unreality.
In a dispute between Mr. Palmer and Mr. Brooks over
stage* Iiands, extra ones, though needed, were not en-
gaged, and altogether it was one o'clock before our first
performance ended. Our New York press was as bad
as. Chicago's had been favorable. Charley Frohman saw
the play in the middle of the week and liked It. But in
Ins characteristic way he touched at once upon what he
thought made it faiL

A .strike-leader who has been shown Into his employer's
hreakfust-room, after stating his claim and the condition
of his people, points to the table and says, "What you
have left there on your plate/* and so on.

Charley said: "That workman saying, * Those bones
are as much as one of our families gets for a day/ was
speaking to a parquet full of people that leave bones.
You can't say those things on the Atlantic seaboard,
although you may in Chicago/*

My own belief is that the play came when papers and
magaxines were so full of the stuff that the public looking
for entertainment didn't want any more of it. But it
hat! been written under conditions less hectic.

As a playwright I was depressed and needed encour-
agement. I thought I had been writing from my knowl-
edge of the Middle West and from my experiences as a
young man, and that those were all I had that was val-
uable to tell I was forgetting that a man's education
may constantly go forward, and if he is a writer or a
painter or sculptor people would still be interested in
seeing things through his temperament. An older man
at that time, L. J. B. Lincoln, said encouraging things.

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SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA

343

its subject, and because it is a fairly condensed expression
upon masculine club life in general, and because it is a
good indication of Lincoln's style as well as a good ex-
ample of impromptu performances, I wish to quote it.
He said:

The evolution of Bohemia as a factor in civilization may be written
from the annals of clubdom. From the day when neolithic man
emerged from his cave and discovered that the grape-juice which
he had squeezed into a cocoanut shell the day before had become a
beverage whose ruddy glow tingled his heartstrings and made him
forget his troubles, he became convivial. Becoming convivial, he
called his friends about him and established a club. Since, an'un-
broken line of care-dispelling, self-forgetting, self-despising good
fellows; Arcadians, Corinthians, Bohemians. So the Anglo-Saxon,
in his gradual absorption of the best things in civilization, has de-
veloped to its greatest value the essence of club life— the dining club.
Literature in English rings with that especial institution. From the
imagination of Chaucer in his Canterbury Pilgrimage to the realities
of Ben Jonson's Apollo and the Mermaid Inn; from the Kit-Kat
Club, Will's Coffee-House, and the still extant Cheshire Cheese—
with its hallowed chair of Doctor Johnson — to the countless groups
which now meet in and out of Alsatia to engender the flow of wisdom
which a hospitable round-table can alone induce, there is one long
and brilliant procession of Bohemians of every rank and class, with-
out whom language becomes tame, art pedantic, and life, as Mr. Man-
talini so succinctly put it, "one demnition grind."

Having been thus respectful to Luther Lincoln's
memory, and after stating further that he was one of
the most vital influences of an artistic and literary kind
that ever came into The Lambs, I hope I shall be for-
given for talking of him in lighter vein. With all his
ability to encourage other men, there was a touch of
fatalistic despondency in him concerning himself. Not
any of his male forbears of whom he had information

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SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 345

sorbeol from his talk and stones in the preceding eight
or nine years, and added to this equipment a most useful
admonition from Captain Jack Summcrhayes, whom I
met in St. Louis, where I stopped a day or two to see
my people. Summcrhayes was attending to some war
preparations at Jefferson Barracks and happened in the
city for that day only. Our meeting was accidental.
His contribution was this:

That department letter you carry will command anything those
iwn can give you; hut they'll feel happier if their contributions seem
voluntary and come only under the head of General Milcs's permis-
sion. Also you will find that they are marooned out there, and that
they will he mighty glad to see you; that about the only thing they
have worth while to them is their rank, and at all times, especially in
the presence of their junior officers, the more respect you pay to that,
the more you do to preserve its traditions, the happier you will make
those old fellows feel.

When, after several weeks in the territory, I came to
say goocl-by to Colonel lid win V. Sunnier, who had given
up to me the best room and private bath in his quarters,

he said:

Thomas, although you've been a member of my family here, I
never came into u room or went onto the porch where you were or
loft a group of which you were a member but that you stood up at
my going and coining just us one of these lieutenants would, and I
want to say to you it made me feel damned fine.

I don't think I would have done anything to hurt that
brave officer, but I am sure I would not have been so
punctiliously attentive to that little ceremony if it hadn't
been for the friendly counsel of Jack Summcrhayes.

On the way to Fort Grant one leaves the railroad at

346 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Willcox, at that time a little one-street row of one-story
shops and barrooms. The hotel proprietor told me as I
came off the train for my first night in Arizona that
an ambulance with four mules was there to carry over
to the fort a captain who was expected on the train ar-
riving at five in the morning. I saw the driver of this
outfit that night. He promised to tell the captain of my
presence, and in the morning I was standing around
ready to be invited. But again, under the remembered
advice of Summerhayes, I didn't spring my headquarters
paper on the captain or try to address anybody except
the commandants to whom the letter was directed; and
as it meant very little to this captain to learn that a
stranger wanted to go to the fort, his four mules and his
ambulance ambled off without me. I went some hours
later on a little two-horse depot wagon that made a daily
trip, and was again fortunate in that fact, as the driver
on that twenty-mile jog told me many useful things. I
was directed from the coIoneFs quarters to the officers*
club. There was no attendant. The single room con-
tained four or five officers playing cards around the table.
After a pause one of them casually looked up. I asked
for Colonel Sumner. He nodded toward that officer.
Sumner, with his cards, paid no attention.

I said, "Letter from Washington/' and handed it to
him; and then, exactly as I had seen messengers re-
hearsed in "Held by the Enemy" and "Shenandoah,"
I stepped back and stood still. The colonel opened his
letter, glanced at it quickly, struck the table a blow.

"Gentlemen!"

All the poker-players stood promptly. I was welcomed
and introduced to the group, with which I spent the
great part of one of the most enjoyable sojourns of my

_ SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA

life. The poker game was immediately broken up and
adjourned, and a half-hour afterward I came from a
refreshing bath and in my store clothes to a fine midday
dinner in the colonel's home with his amiable wife and
wholesome and attractive daughter.

That was on March 17, 1897. I don't have to refer
to any records to recover the date, because from the
lunch we went to the parade-grounds, where a big tent
had been set up with a telegraph wire leading into it,
and the men of three troops of cavalry, and I think two
infantry companies, gathered to hear the report by rounds
of the championship prize-fight between Jim Corbett and
Bob Fitzsimmons, then beginning in Carson City,
Nevada. Among the officers I saw one or two faces that
struck me as familiar, and then one of the few civilians
there, limping a bit on a cane, I recognized as my Leaven-
worth attorney, Hon. Thomas P. Fenlon. He introduced
me to his son-in-law, Captain Nicholson, also at the post
and in whose quarters he was staying. Nicholson had
been one of the officers in Plowman's court-room that
busy afternoon eleven years before when they had ridden
over from Fort Leavenworth in full dress to protest the
foolish slander of the talented Helen M. Gouger.

I am working now between the need to economize
space and a wish to talk freely enough about my experi-
ence to fix whatever significance it may have to other
men trying to make plays. And when I say significance
I mean only that. I don't mean a rule or a way of doing.
Each man writing plays makes his own rules, and one
man at different times will have different ways. If I
seem occasionally minute it will not be because I regard
any act of mine in epic fashion, but only because I re-
member it as an articulating part of what subsequently

347

348 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANC

became machinery in a play. I had been writing
too long to be entirely free from habit. I suppose
man sent out to write a comic opera would at leas
by thinking in terms of a quartet. All those fine s<
every sturdy private, the smart officers, the force
colonel, each of them began to be in my mind a p
factor if not centre of romance.

The officers' quarters there in Fort Grant are
and face the parade-ground. To the western end
row the first two or three are two-story building
stantial as any brick or brownstone residences
city. They then tail off into bungalows, with fine
porches, and all, because of their doby walls, wii
window and door recesses from eighteen inches
feet deep. I don't remember how many ladies \
the fort; I should say half a dozen. The majc
these, of course, were married; and when w<
checked off their husbands it left a fine circle oJ
tached officers, attentive, complimentary, respect
heard no breath of scandal or even of gossip that
way involved this compact little community, but
impossible to view them with an imagination b
the theatre without beginning to play chess wit
reputations. Nothing could be further from fac
any hint of discordance in the household of Color
Sumner and his wife, almost his own age; but as I '
to use him as a principal character, I had no compi
in mentally hooking him up with a much younger ^
somewhat regretful of the disparity in their yea
course this discontent of the wife would be evi<
more than one of the young officers, if not actually
in or promoted by one or another. Besides d<
life at the quarters, there were a few wives down

SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 349

barracks, and one or two daughters of enlisted men. My
difficulty on the first day or two was to keep an open
mind and not have these characters form associations in
my fancy that would by repetition of the concept begin
to take on the authority of fact.

As I listened to Colonel Sumner talk at his dinner-
talkie of cattlemen, Indians, and soldiers; as I heard
Mrs. Sumner tell of Tony, the doby messenger that came
down the valley with social notes, I felt that the field
was too rich to make immediate commitments of selec-
tion.

Some dispenser of mental tonic has said that thoughts
are things. I oiler no opinion on that, but if they are
they're curious things, and it is hard for one who trades
in them to keep clear of superstition. I have seldom
begun to work earnestly upon any line of reflection but
what that line has been frequently twanged by cross-
currents that the overeredulous would misread. I wrote
earlier in these chapters of coincidences, naming two that
were noteworthy in my own experience. Personally, I
am willing to accept the explanation of somebody whose
words, but not whose name, I remember, to the effect
that a line of thought is like a magnetized wire, and that
particles from all the waves and currents that cross it
adhere when there is sufficient affinity. If that is true,
a man thinking along certain lines would mistake the
selection ma.de by his attention for fateful response.

I wonder if this is an approach too clumsy to another
one of these points. I was slowly dictating the stuff
above about the military post and was thinking as I
had been thinking for a day or two about Hooker's ranch,
sonic ten or twelve miles away from it, and how I could
be accurate about certain items, when Robert Bruce,

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SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 351

who came periodically to get their supplies from the
government. He told me also of the ranchers who were
his neighbors at intervals of ten and fifteen miles. | ,

After a few days at the post I was taken over to \\

Hooker's ranch. The administrative centre of this was t,l

also the residence of Mr. Hooker, his daughter-in-law
and grandson. This doby hacienda was a quadrangle
about one hundred feet square, with blank walls some
eighteen feet high outside. Three sides of the inner court
were made up of little rooms one-story high, with roofs
sloping to the centre and rising to somewhat less than
the height of the outer walls, whose superior margin
served as parapet in case of attack. A fourth side of the
quadrangle, besides having a room or two and a shed for
vehicles, had a large reinforced double gate that could
be thrown to and fastened with heavy bars and staples.
In the centre of the court thus formed there was a well, \

so that the colony might have water to withstand a
siege.

Henry C. Hooker was a quiet little man who had been
some twenty-five or thirty years in that locality selling
beef to "government and Apaches"; at times on the
defensive, and at other times on friendly terms with his
savage neighbors. He had known the old Apache chief,
Cochise, the predecessor of Geronimo, and had a hun-
dred interesting tales of his experiences with Indians,
and cowboys, and soldiers. He was under the average
height of the American, was slight and quiet, and while
adopting him I took the liberty of replacing him in my
mind with a more robust and typical frontiersman; but
hundreds of the lines I finally gave to Henry Canby,
the rancher in the play of "Arizona/5 were Hooker's own
words, which I remembered, and as soon as I was alone

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SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 353

bustle for it in un Indian uprising. This had the disad-
vantage of harking back to several other American plays,
and to something of the color of Jessie Brown and the
relief of Lucknow. But there was nothing else in sight.
To reach San Carlos from Fort Grant was a day's cavalry
match up the valley to Dunlop's, and another day's ride
over the mountains. The first half of this journey was
made in an ambulance with mules drawing it, while a
small detachment of cavalry, a telegraph construction
outfit, two Indian guides, and live or six pack-mules
with supplies were in the escort. Dunlop's was another
doby house, with ornamental steel ceilings on the ground
floor, and an upright piano.

We had an early start the second morning, with every-
body in tin* saddle. Captain My or, in charge of our de-
taehment, lent me a handsome pacing stallion, gentle
and a weight-earner. The features of our second clay's
trip, none of which I used in the play and which there-
Ion* have little place in this recital except as they con-
tribute to a sense of hardship and the stamina needed
to meet it, were narrow trails on the hogback of the moun-
tains, where the aneroid barometer showed five thousand
feet, and where the path was so narrow that everything
was intrusted to the animals, which carefully picked
their way one* font in absolute line before the other, some-
times all four set for a short slide and often each stone
gingerly tested to make sure of footing, climbing grades
dn which no horse eould have carried any rider, and where
no tenderloin, no matter how stout of lung, could have
climbed in that thin air unaided.

The procedure was to take with one hand a tight grip
on the long tail of your horse, and let him pull you as
you walked behind him and led the horse for the man

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SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 355

that lust week in March that we turned up the collars
of our leather jackets lined with sheepskin; yet we rode
through bright air so clear that the sun burned our cheeks
more swiftly than August in the Mississippi Valley.

At noon we stopped a half hour for dinner and to rest
the horses. It was astonishing to see an Indian put a
coffee-pot on two or three little stones the size of a lien's
egg, slip under it u bunch of burning grass not larger
than a shaving brush, feed it with a few splinters, and
boil two quarts of coffee quicker than I have ever seen
it heated upon a stove.

The Gila River is filled with quicksand. Here and
there is a ford. As we approached the river a trooper
rode from the fort a mile away, took his station on the
opposite bank to guide our string, which made the ford
in Indian fashion.

Captain Myer called back: "Lift your feet; out of the
water! Hold up your horse's head or he'll lie down and
roll! Follow your leader closely I"

At that hour of sundown, after a day in the saddle, I
could do everything commanded except hold up my feet;
they dragged inertly alongside the stallion and the river
flowed into them over the boot-tops. When we pulled
up at the little bungalows which were our destination
two troopers helped me get my right leg over the back of
the saddle and kept me from falling when, it reached the
ground,

A kindly fat old doctor who was there looked me over
and without the formality of an introduction said: "Put
this man in a hot bath/* As he did so I put him into my
play.

While in tin* tub a striker brought me a. telegram from
Colonel Sumner:

356 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

"How's the patient?"

I dictated the answer: "Not so beautiful as he was,
but knows more/*

When I came down the four steps of the little shack
to go to the mess-room the next morning I took each
degree slowly and hung onto the banisters like a man
half paralyzed. There is nothing like a good case of horse
rheumatism to put a tenderfoot out of commission.

A week at San Carlos was interesting. One had the
Apache at first hand; but as all that color was revised
from the play before production, space for it here would
only emphasize the fact that there are a good many chips
and much rejected material in every workshop. But
such discarded stuff is still valuable to have in the lum-
ber-room. I sha'n't talk of deceptive distances or tell
any stories of men starting to walk a seeming three miles
and learning that their visible objective is fifteen miles
away.

Besides, one isn't always credited. On the trip home,
an hour or two out of El Paso, is the station Alamogordo.

A shrewd New Englander asked: "What are those
mountains to the northeast there? "

"Those are the Sierra Blanca — White Mountains."

A real Pinkerton, penetrating, unwavering look; a
self-possessed stroke of the chin whiskers and then cold
rebuke:

"Young man, the White Mountains air in New Hamp-
shire."

In the territories on the way back and at home I was
busy on the play, with an Indian uprising as my prin-
cipal machinery. And in its first draft the play was so
finished. .

Early in the morning of February 16, 1898, James

SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 357

Waterbury, the agent of the Western Union Company l

at New Rochelle, telephoned me that the Maine had *

been blown up and sunk in the harbor of Havana. Know- i

ing the interest the report would have for my neighbor, f \

Frederic Remington, I immediately called him on the f I

telephone and repeated the information. His only thanks ^

or comment was to shout "Ring off!" In the process of * «

doing so I could hear him calling the private telephone K;

number of his publishers in New York. In his mind |;

his own campaign was already actively under way. h

One incident of that campaign illustrates the primitive t5

man in Remington. He and Richard Harding Davis ^

were engaged to go into Cuba by the back way and send * f

material to an evening newspaper. The two men were :\
to cross in the night from Key West to Cuba on a I

mackerel-shaped speed boat of sheet-iron and shallow -|

draft. Three times the boat put out from Key West ;!

and three times turned back, unable to stand the weather. ; *
The last time even the crew lost hope of regaining port. I

Davis and Remington were lying in the scuppers and j

clinging to the shallow rail to keep from being washed • !•

overboard. The Chinaman cook, between lurches, was (\

lashing together a door and some boxes to serve as a f

raft. Davis suggested to Remington the advisability of ^

trying something of the kind for themselves. j|

"Lie still!" Remington commanded. "You and I /]

don't know how to do that. Let him make his raft. If -\

we capsize I'll throttle him and take it from him." p

Some months later, on learning of the incident, I tried r?

to discuss the moral phase of it with him. c

But he brushed my hypocrisy aside with the remark: ^
"Why, Davis alone was worth a dozen sea cooks I I
don't have to talk of myself."

358 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

It wasn't a difficult task to take out all the Indian
stuff in my manuscript and to make the motive the get-
ting together of a troop of cowboys. My impulse was
prophetic of the Rough Riders. I wrote Denton's cow-
boy troop and the khaki jacket into the play at once, and
changed such few speeches of the script as this introduc-
tion made necessary. On July 8, President McKinley
nominated Colonel Leonard Wood to be brigadier-gen-
eral, and Lieutentant-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt to be
colonel of the First Volunteer Cavalry.

A few years ago I wrote some prefaces to precede cer-
tain printed plays of mine. If it wasn't for fear that
watchful editors would strike out the statement I would
quote the Boston Transcript to the effect that when
Thomas is dead these prefaces will be put together in
limp leather and printed as little classics. Perhaps if
I don't tell the names of the plays or their publisher this
statement will get by. In one of them I said:

"This play was salvage; that is to say, it was a mar-
keting of odds and ends and remnants utterly useless
for any other purpose." And elsewhere in these remem-
brances I've said that all is fish that comes to a play-
wright's pond.

Late in the winter of 1896, when the other guests had
gone home after dinner, Mr. Joseph D. Redding, of the
Bohemian Club, San Francisco, was at the piano in our
living-room at New Rochelle; listening to him were
Mr. Will Gillette, my wife, and I. Redding was running
over the keys and talking through the music in that enter-
taining way which as musician and talker he has in such
eminent degree.

Over one haunting melody he said: "Here's something

SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 359

I heard a little girl singing alone, hidden from the rain in
a cloby doorway in Santa Barbara/'

There was a moment's silence when he finished the
melody, and my wife said: "A little girl that could sing
like that wouldn't be alone."

Gillette, in his metallic tenor, added, "Besides, it never
rains in Santa Barbara."1

Each of these lines was worth a smile to our firelight
party; and just as I am telling the story to you I told
it at a banquet-table at the Santa Barbara Club in 1901.
I hoped only for good-natured reception and was at utter
loss to understand why men slapped each other on the
back and roared with glee and rocked on their unsteady
chairs. The toast-master felt I was entitled to an explana-
tion. A real-estate man present explained the laugh by
telling that Gillette some years before had bought a con-
siderable country estate* at Montecito, a suburb of Santa
Barbara, lie had bought it on blue-prints and photo-
graphs shown by the agent. One of these photographs
showed a bounding, purling brook, snapped immediately
after one of the infrequent rainstorms of that section.
On the other three hundred and sixty-four days in the
year this watercourse was dry.

That kind of thing amuses real-estate men.

On that winter evening, however, Gillette told us
nothing of this dusty brook, but asked Redding to repeat
his rainy music.

Those were the firelight times before the introduction
of auction bridge and when people of sensibility some-
times sat about and played or listened to little inter-
pretations of that Redding kind. I have more than once
solved some knotty problem in play-building by a mood

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SOME EXPERIENCES IN ARIZONA 361

all together, and was unable to make and untroubled
by any distinction, so that when I got him into the play
I was able to have him finish his lover's declaration after
the song with "and damn to hell my soul, I love you I"

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GAMBOLS AND TRAVELS

In its revised shape I submitted my completed
script to Charles Frohman. Although his influence
procured the railroad transportation that I had
getting to Arizona, and he had been looking forvvaard
the completion of the play, something in the soracp"^
in my reading of it, because he listened to the fou*~
as I read them, decided him against this
With the war on, managers were timid and my
drama seemed unlikely of early production. I
myself with the conduct of The Lambs' first all-star gar** •
bol.

There are few social clubs to whose functions
with propriety ask attention. But The Lambs,
of its theatrical membership and prominence, is
that few. For many years an occasional night kad
taken in the club when members free from profession**!
calls got together in an entertainment the back£>orxo c»i
which was some burlesque by some skilled man. xxjpof*
some current success. Programmes from several of till ON r*
intimate performances had occasionally been give::n t * t
the public of New York. In 1898 it was decided to ma k « • *
a much more pretentious appeal by players, all of -win out;
should be stars. Contracts for the exclusive services *if
one dollar per week for the last week in-May were d:r a wf 1 1
between the club on one side and on the other Nat: Grooc f -»
win, De Wolf Hopper, Stuart Robson, William

362

UUH IVIA I U lUMl,

Joseph (irismer, Jesse Williams, Victor Herbert, Ignutio
Martinetti, Victor Harris, and some forty other men of
almost equal prominence; u half dozen playwrights and
as many musicians; also Victor Herbert's band and
orchestra of lifty pieces.

The company, all told, included over one hundred
men. It was computed that their joint salaries, accord-
ing to what they were then getting upon the road, would
for that week have amounted to one hundred and twenty-
five thousand dollars. Theatres were leased for one night
only in New York, Brooklyn,. Washington, Philadelphia,
Boston, Springfield, Pittsburgh, aw! Chicago. Advance
work for publicity was done in all these cities. Contracts
existed for a special train of four sleepers, three dining-
cars, and two baggage-cars. Rehearsals were well under
way when war was declared. Matters of equal importance
from the amusement point of view were crowded front
the papers by the war news, ft would have been possible*
to cancel the tour and contracts and pay all claims in-
curred for some fifteen thousand dollars, and such a course
was advised by Joseph Brooks, the manager at the head
of the business group. As general amusement director
of this gambol, which was to lift the debt from a new
clubhouse recently built, the necessity of additional in-
debtedness if we gave up the trip decided me to go on
with it. When Brooks quit I put the business manage-
ment up to Kirke La Shelle, then handling the Bostonians.
The club gave the week of gambols in the cities named
and took in sixty-two thousand dollars.

364 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

This businesslike resume of that venture is impressive,
but the sentimental side of it will appeal to those ac-
quainted with the players. I shall tell only of the first
feature of the programme: an old-sty le-minstrel first
part, pyramided on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera
House, in which, with Herbert's band, there were one
hundred men. The interlocutor, end men, and vocalists,
all in the regulation evening dress, at the end of the
opening chorus were on their feet. The great audi-
torium of the Metropolitan Opera House was crowded
from parquet to dome with one of the most select audi-
ences ever assembled within its walls. When we remem-
ber that we were only in the first month of our war with
Spain we can form some conception of the enthusiasm
as this audience rose when the medley finished with the
"Star-Spangled Banner," and then the burst as every
nigger singer at cue drew from the inside of his white
vest, instead of a pocket handkerchief, an American flag
of silk.

We had been under pressure to start promptly in order
to make train connections for the next town, and I am
not sure that anybody has ever explained just why the
curtain was held. The facts are, however, that it was
difficult for my wife to get to the Metropolitan at 8.15
owing to certain attention that our baby had to have
at that time before it got to bed. She had promised to
make haste, and I had promised to stand in the prompt
entrance and if possible to hold the curtain until I saw
her take her seat in the front row of the dress circle. Men
on the stage were fretting, and the audience — there was
twenty-seven thousand dollars in the house — was getting
impatient, but the baby delayed them only four minutes.

In June of that year, 1898, I made my first crossing

GAMBOLS AND TRAVELS 365

of the Atlantic Ocean. With us on that boat were seven
members of The Lambs CIub™Chaunecy Oleott, Wal-
ter Hale, Vincent Serrano, Rowland Buckstonc, Joe
Wheelock, Jr., RuckstuII, and one other. First-class
fare was fifty dollars; the lowtrst quotation now is two
hundred and fifty. The old Victoria was a cattle-boat
with bilge-keels • that is, an additional keel on each side,
somewhat below the water-line, to prevent her rolling.
The eat tie were where the steerage ordinarily is, and we
never knew of them. The usual orgnni/.ing person was
among the passengers, bent upon netting up a concert
for the benefit of disabled seamen. And the captain
thought; it would take the passengers* minds from the
constant fear of Spanish gunboats -submarines were
not yet in use. Our American actors couldn't recite, but
they could play if they had a manuscript; so with their
urging and advice and occasional assistance I wrote a
comedy about twenty-five minutes long dealing entirely
with the ship's company, which we called u Three Days
Out/' In it Chauneey Oleott played an old Irishwoman,
Hale a romantic tenor, Buekstcme an English financier,
and young Wheeloek, who looked like the bathroom
steward, impersonated that official* borrowing and wear-
ing his clothes for the performance; Serrano played a
Spanish cattle-raiser, Ruckslull was a walking gentle-
man, I was an American business man. We went aft
near the steering-gear to rehearse it in the open sunshine.
Three days before we got into port we gave a performance
which netted a handsome purse for the beneficiaries.

Charles Frohman was in London at that time laying
his first plans for Ins extensive theatrical control that
developed later. We had our card filled with all kinds
of agreeable appointments, and I met then for the first

366 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

time J. M. Barrie, Bernard Shaw, Alfred Sutro, Beer-
bohm Tree, George Alexander, Arthur Bourchier, and
Max Beerbohm.

Our first night in Paris was the evening of July 14,
the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Instead of
the firecrackers and pinwheels of America, Paris expressed
itself in street festivals and dances. In every arrondisse-
ment, or ward, there was a central gathering where music
was furnished by a municipal band and where the neigh-
borhood people danced on the clean asphalt of the street.
It was into one of these circles only a few years before
that Charley Evans and Bill (Old Hoss) Hoey walked,
and catching the time of the music began an impromptu
dance of the American model. To visualize this fully
one must remember Hoey, with his full black beard and
eccentric manner; and remember the natty, smooth-
shaven Charley Evans of those days in his flat-brimmed
straw hat; and then the pair of them surrounded by the
gradually widening circle of astonished Paris tradesmen
as those two American boys competed with each other
in remembered and invented steps of vaudeville assort-
ment. That would be a rare treat to-day for an American
audience familiar with that character of dancing and
gathered at Longacre Square. But at that time, for
that simple pirouetting bourgeoisie, it was electrically
eccentric.

I shall offer no tourist's impression of Paris, but there
is a notable remembrance of Jean Jaures, the great so-
cialist, pleading for evolution, not revolution. He was
assassinated a few years later, but Ruck and I went to
hear him then. He talked upon the theme I have fur-
tively referred to in earlier chapters, and which in the
past hard winter of unemployment more than one pub-

GAMBOLS AND TRAVELS 367

Hoist advanced. Jaures was sure that the trouble with
capital and labor \vas not one of class warfare, but that
both classes in some fashion were troubled by the ma-
chine in industry; by competition between owners of
competing machinery, but principally by competition of
the human creature against the insensate I'Yunkenstein
creation. If is remedy was an ownership by the state of
all the mechanical facilities of production.

Some day we shall diseriminately tax them according
to wist* conferences between all nations,

When we came to recross the Atlantic, in August,
there was still some fear of the Spanish gunboats.

As our trouble with Spain subsided I carried the play,
"Ari/.ona/1 to Kirke La Shelle. There was no theatre
available in Now York; he arranged for the production of
the play at Hamlin's Grand Opera House in Chicago the
following summer, i8tjt>. I have said earlier that Kirke
La Shelle had the quality °f the captain, and 1 am sure
that had he lived he would have been one of the most
dominant influences in the American theatre. Only to
the theatrical reader will the following be significant,
but the original cast of MAri/<ma" included Theodore
Roberts, Edwin Holt, Mnttie Earle, Mubel Hurt, Robert
Edeson, Olive May, Sam Edwards, Arthur Byron, Vin-
cent Serrano, Eninklin Garland, Walter Hale, Lionel
Bnrrymore, and Mentfee Johnstone; and the four or live
other characters \\ere by people of less repute but of
equal earnestness ami ability. Few authors doing a
melodrama have had better co-operation than that.

There was- an incident of the first night that seems to
me worth telling, I had rehearsed the* piece myself, and
in that work been busy* Having need for a squad of
soldiers to firing on two men under arrest, a Few days

368 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

before our opening, I spoke to a group of supers that
had been called.

"Any of you had military experience?"

Two or three replied affirmatively. To the most likely
of these I said: "Where?"

"In Cuba."

"Can you train four men in the manual and the drill?"

He said, "Yes, sir."

"Pick your four and report when you have done it."

In a little while he was ready. At our dress rehearsal
La Shelle and I sat apart in the parquet. Things had
gone well. We were on the last act. Two sympathetic
characters were to come on in the custody of the noncom
and the squad. They did so, the seven of them marching
to their proper places on the stage, with a smart "halt"
and "carry arms."

I stopped the rehearsal and said to the young man,
"Go back and make that entrance again."

While they were going out to do this La Shelle came
across the parquet in the greatest earnestness.

"I thought that was splendidly done."

"So did I."

"Why did you send them back?"

"I want to see them do it again."

In a curtain speech the next night I told this incident,
then reverted to a rehearsal of "In Mizzoura" some five
or six years before in Chicago, when from a similar group
of supers I had asked for a man who could heat and weld
and put a tire on a wheel, and found exactly the proper
helper for Burr Mclntosh, the blacksmith. I ventured
the belief that if I were to write a play about the stars
and called upon a bunch of Chicago supers I could find
among them a volunteer astronomer. I told the audience

GAMBOLS AND TRAVELS 36<)

that this young man who had responded so promptly
as a soldier and had drilled his squad so efieetively would
be on in the next aet ; lie didn't know 1 was speaking of
him, hut if the aiuhenee thought as mueh of his perform-
anee as l,a Shelle and I had thought they would under-
stand why I emphasi/ed it. When the two prisoners
and the squad eame on a few minutes later they got the
biggest round of the play. That young super was a lad
named Sydney Ainsworth, who the following year was
playing a responsible part in tin* play, and the next year
with one of the mad eompanies was playing the hero.
He beeame a favorite leading man,

On August 18, in that summer of i8<;t), Kid MeCoy
was to meet Jaek MeO»rmaek. MeCov had many ad-
mirers in our eoinpany, and, as I remember, the general
odds were some four to one on him. The dressing-rooms,
whieh were4 under the stage of the (*nuul Opera House
at that time, were bu//.ing with interest in theupproaeh-
ing battle as our men were making up for the night.
Harry Harnlin and I hud tiekets for the light, but de-
elined to take any of the attractive odds that were of-
fered at the theatre.

The meeting was only three or four bloeks away. As
the two men faeed eaeh other in the first round Hamlm
was searehing his poekets for some mutehes. A sound from
the ring and a startled response from the amiienee re-
elainu'tl his attention, While MeCoy had been gaily
guying with some of tin* press men at the ringside,
McCormaek had knoeked him out with the first ptineh.
Uamlw and 1 were soon baek in the theatre. We seemed
to have been only wandering from one dressing-room ''to
another. Lionel Barry more, Arthur Byron, Robert
Ecleson,. and Walter Hale had not yet gone on. Theodore

370 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Roberts, Edwin Holt, and Vincent Serrano came off
a minute or two from the first act, and we were a!
quickly to take all the bets offered on McCoy at the <
cessive odds. We disappeared. Later news came di
to the theatre and found a sad family. At Rectoi
after the performance, Hamlin and I confessed to havi
seen the fight before the betting and disgorged our
gotten gains.

One notable engagement made that summer takes i
mind back a few years further to a set of incidents tl
seem amusing. In writing these reminiscences I ha
hit only the high spots. To give even a paragraph
each of some sixty-four plays produced would be an ite
ized bill of grief, unpardonable in any recollections,
couple of years before my trip to Arizona I had dc
a play for Mr. Daniel Frohman which I read to his see
artist and stage-manager and him, and which at tl
time was acceptable. Something prevented the prodi
tion and I revamped it from a serious four-act play t<
three-act comedy called "Don't Tell Her Husbanc
T. D. Frawley had a stock company at the Columl
Theatre, San Francisco, under the management of Go
lob and Friedlander. They wanted to produce the p.
under my direction and sent me in advance money
railroad fares, sleeper, and expenses across the contine

At the railroad office I met Crane's manager, Jose
Brooks, who, learning my destination, linked his a
with mine and said: "Just starting for California w
the Crane company. There's an empty section in <
car and glad to have you." He declined to take ]
money, saying it would vitiate his railroad contract if
made any subsales, but he added: "The boys play pal
and they will be glad to win that from you."

GAMBOLS AND TRAVELS 371

We were lour days crossing the continent. The poker
players in Mr. Crane's company were himself, Brooks,
and my good friends Walter Hale and Vincent, Serrano.
Under a moral obligation to lose those one hundred and
twenty-five dollars to them, I came in on every little J

pair only to call up that protecting, fate that is said to
hover over the weak-minded and the infantile. I landed
at the old Baldwin Hotel with the hundred and twenty-
five intact and some more contributed by the four gentle*- "*

men named. In the delightful grill of that old hotel,
long since destroyed by fire, 1 saw (Jottlob and I 'Vied- v

lander having dinner. ( Jot t lob came over to my table. *

I told him tin* arrangement under which I had travelled
and that had 1 lost tin* money I should have considered
it a legitimate although circuitous, application of the
expense fund. Not having lost it, I returned it to him. ^

It was worth one hundred and twenty-live dollars to see
that new sensation in his business experience. He carried
the money back to I;riedlander. They held an excited
consultation, nr.anietf me curiously; later both joined
me, and after manv tentative* as to the kind of enter-
tainment 1 would find most agreeable carried me of! to
a private box at n pri/.e-light that was1 occurring that
evening.

In Mr. I'YawIey's company, which contained such ex-
cellent players as Frank Worthing, I Tank Carfyle, {'"raw-
ley himself, and Maxine Elliott, there was also the more
experienced actress, Madge Can" Cook. I ler little daugh-
ter was just biy.inning her stage experience, and as I ^

remember took the part of u maid to carry on a. card in
our play. The gill's stage name was KIcanor Robson.
She* did so well with Frawley that a short time thereafter
she wits playing leads in Denver, and when Olive May

•< i

372 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

had to leave the "Arizona" company during our summer
in Chicago Eleanor Robson came to take her place. Not
since the early days with Mar owe had I seen a young
woman who had come on the stage with so many fine
natural qualities, and before she opened in the part of
Bonita I told La Shelle that she would be a star in a short
while, and it would be wise to make an immediate ar-
rangement with her. He agreed with me; but, deferring
his negotiations until after the New York opening of the
company, found that Eleanor Robson was then under
a starring contract with Mr. George Tyler. New York
will remember its artistic disappointment when after a
few brilliant characterizations Eleanor Robson became
Mrs. August Belmont and society and charitable enter-
prises gained what the stage lost.

My little play, "Don't Tell Her Husband/' was taken
by Stuart Robson, who changed the title to "The Med-
dler," and played it for two years. The increased friend-
ship between Hale, Serrano, and myself at the poker table
in the Crane car, together with our transatlantic trip,
deepened my wish to have them in the "Arizona" com-
pany, where their grip upon the public was the result
of their own merits.

There is a series of happenings in the relationship of
those two friends that carries an interesting psychological
study. After a time in the original company Hale quit
the German-character part and played the heavy man
opposite Serrano, now advanced to hero. Near the end
of the third act it was Serrano's business to walk over to
Hale, who stood well down left, and after looking him in
the eye a minute slap him over the side of the face with
a sombrero; a trick slap with the force of the blow falling
more on Hale's shoulder than upon his face. In one of

C1AMBOIS AND TRAVELS 373

I\ peil'it'inanees, however, a leather band around
i!uer« » had struck I laic's face and hurt him slightly,

< a;,'Ji to make him apprehensive thereafter; and
\ i m the street lie fell unconscious. The doctor

hi', ilitilculty to this fear of the blow. Hale left
Vii',emenl and returned to his earlier work us etcher
[u'ltrator. He travelled with his talented wife,

Ciov.er, ttir some time in Europe, came back to
i -at re, and played several parts with distinction, >

i total interval of some ten years he was playing
piece, 4IA«. a Man Thinks," in which John Mason
t* star and Vincent Serrano was the hero. i

inr opining ni^hi in Hartford, near the end of the
u't, Hale luiyuf Ins lines and couldn't take them
itr piuinplcr. lU* was all right at the next day's
>uL But aj'.ain at nt^lit the same lapse occurred. ^ fi

s a coiiM'teaf iotts artist, and in great depression
o me and wanted to surrender his part. I asked
' try another prrfonnanee aiui let me look at it
iv front. For l lie third time his lines escaped him*
the play was over Hale was positive in his decision
. I 'said:

liter, 1 think the trouble is that it is Serrano who
clown left and confronts you* Your position on
tj4e and your personal relations in the story are
lat they were in that old cowboy play; but if you
member that Serrano doesn't wear a sombrero ;

not jviujn It* strike you with one, and that you

vinj.; Mr. !)c Lnki in a parlor story of New York,
liculty \\i\\ tlisappear/'
Clayed perfectly that night and was never troubled

manner a^ain. <

these papers Lcgan to appear in serial form 1

r ^ j^

ordinary memory. But here are two sides of that in-
teresting subject: In the previous chapter I have written
of Mr. Robert Bruce bringing me some information that
I needed about Henry C Hooker, the Arizona ranch-
man. Until Mr. Bruce came in at that opportune mo-
ment I had never seen him.

Now on the other side: I wished to write about a
cornet-player and his performance on a memorable night
in 1901. It would be all right to refer to him imperson-
ally, but my effort to get his name is a fair example of
much of the work that has been incident to all that I
have written. This cornetist was in a company support-
ing Mr. Peter Dailey in a musical play called "Cham-
pagne Charlie/5 which I wrote for him and which was
produced late in August in that year. Last October,
1921, I tried to get Dailey5 s manager, Mr. Frank McKee.
He was out of the city, address unknown. After two later
attempts to locate him, the question of the cornetist
came up again just now as I reached the end of this chap-
ter.

I stopped dictation and for thirty minutes my secre-
tary and I pursued the following process : Walter Jordan,
a play agent and sometime friend of McKee, is called;
he gives McKee5 s residence; information gives his tele-
phone; we talk to McKee; he remembers the cornetist
very well, but the enterprise was twenty years ago and
he forgets his name. Peter Dailey is dead. The next
important member of the company is that excellent come-
dian Eddie Garvey; Garvey would probably remember

GAMBOIS AND TRAVELS 375

lie musician. We try to locate Garvey. Miss Huni-
xTt, of the Packard Theatrical Agency, thinks Garvey
s with Charlotte Greenwood's company on the road
mdcr the management of Oliver Moroseo. Morosco's
>fllce is called in order to locate the company. They tell
us that Garvey left the company two or three weeks
igo; they haven* t his address, but the engagement was
nude through an agent named Leslie Moroseo.

Leslie Moroseo, when called, knows Mr. Garvey *s
iddress and his telephone number, but is reluctant to
;ive them to persons inquiring over the photic. Our
dentity is established, the nature of the business ex-
>IuinecI, and the Saturday Evening Post reierrcd to; then
Survey's number is given; fortunately Garvey is at
lome; he remembers the name of the eornetist and the
nan himself very well. He says that the eornetist; was
rVilliam Disston, of Philadelphia, where his father was
L skilled maker of cornets. William Disston and Garvey
vere together in many <>f the Charles Hoyt productions,
lotably "The Milk White Flag/* and Disston's singular
kill as a eornetist, almost equalling that of the famous
ules Levy, got him his engagement along with Garvey
\\ the Peter Duiley company referred to in which he was
eatured on the programme and gave a cornet solo. Gar-
'ey remembers the night in question, although he doesn't
emcmber the exact date* I Ic and Disston left the theatre
ogether. Disston wan a convivial person, and the eom-
>any being that week in Providence,, Rhode Island, Diss-
im and Garvey went to the rooms of the Musicians*
Jnion, where there were some beer and songs and music
util a late hour. Tlicy then started to go home, but
i order to do so were obliged to pass the oiliee of the
^evidence Journal. In front of this building about a

"' ii. i

376 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

thousand men were gathered, watching the bulletins in
the windows. As the last one appeared Disston took
his cornet from its case.

My own relation to that occasion was this: I was in
bed in the stately old Narragansett Hotel. The night
was warm. Two windows of the room were open. At
about three o'clock in the morning I was wakened by
the sound of the cornet. It came over the night air, carry-
ing the strains of that impressive old hymn, "Nearer,
My God, to Thee." It took a moment to recognize this,
and then the expertness of the playing convinced me that
the player was Disston. I got out of bed and leaned
on the window-sill. As the cornet began a repetition of
the hymn it was joined by a male chorus of some thou-
sand voices, and there plainly came the words: "E'en
though it be a cross that raiseth me." I knew then that
President William McKinley, who had Iain wounded for
a week in Buffalo, was dead. I was surprised as I listened
to the finish of the hymn to find that my cheeks were
wet with tears. "Nearer, My God, to Thee5* had been
a favorite hymn with my grandmother. My mind went
back to her and the death of President Lincoln — to the
tears, the solemnity of that tragic time — and, in the mid-
dle distance, Garfield.

Walter Wellman, famous journalist, wrote of that
night in Buffalo, where in the Milburn residence President
McKinley died: "In his last period of consciousness
. . . the surgeons bent down to hear his words. He
chanted the first lines of his favorite hymn, 'Nearer,
My God, to Thee/ A little later he spoke again; Doc-
tor Mann^wrote the words down at the bedside, and the
last conscious utterance of William McKinley was:

" 'Good-by, all; good-by. It is God's way. His will
be done/

GAMBOLS AND TRAVELS

377

"The President soon afterward lapsed into uncon-
piousness, and did not rally again. The end came at
.15 A, M., Saturday, September 14."

Three Presidents of the United States had been killed
y madmen. The reverberations of those three shots I
eard.

X\I

TO COLOHMX) I UK Si 'A *^f \ S I HI \L

I have wiilten of a \ * '? ! > v
order to »*et watni.i' I i TV- •' i
earlier of }'nin/. !M» I t * M
familiar with flu* CM" ? , ;•
of its liua! IM'MJ, N
to ovi rstatr f ht i ,i} *? ^ f '
at first hand. It w.i- I •« ' U*
himself fiesli on hi . «• * •
illustratin",. Ku l;.n*i f Iv J ' . !
tices visiting, ncMti\ t M- • » . v
in his se;u eh f«»i \ i \ .?: * ^ i
when C )hatlc*- !'i »i -i ,r , f; /M, ! ,
product* "Aii/nua/' v, »"?• 1"

1 Was }fja<l tu ;'M !M ( '«/. ^ i * * * .

llu* result ni t'at f "» - T ',
a!>out. I /.i»t ,t pi 4, «tf t >. ' , ] *
with inatni.il ami t1! ,IM ,u • ^
a string o! buno». !»i j\ ' %»/ ».T
as I had seen thrin d«t n i1! \*--
fine touch on paptt an*} * r^, »•• i
but when t!»e Inniiis i oi tfM- *«»,' ,• '
and drew attention hum !'*...'..

valuable. 1 hr flralr,! ta- 't , *
tered interest. I f.ine\ P n -.. *
playwright fails beeatr.i- »»! i: . ,,-i ,
considered his Jtren^th; ih.it J , ! >.
use of such things. Al«it:t it^ o !r a j

k* I/- :*4 »n
1 -; ,-r

, r- it',

! * * i-,

r ' „, , r

TO COLORADO FOR NEW MATERIAL 379

dramatist, Mr. Clyde Fitch, produced a play called "Her

Own Way/* in which Maxim: KHiott was the heroine, but
in which a little hairdresser girl who talked Hast; Side
slang made the most pronounced impression.

Nothing had been easier tor Fitch than to write this
clK.iract.er hit, and when he found it was so acceptable
he said: "Well, if you like* that kind of thing I'll give you
twenty such characters/* and immediately wrote a play
in which he did. This was a piece called "Glad of It/'
in which he multiplied Ins Fast Side hairdresser till she
was a blemish.

I had been successful with "Alabama/1 with "In Mi/.-
zoura/1 and with "Ari/ona" in carrying forward a. simul-
taneous interest in two or three different couples, being
careful, of course, to have them contribute to what was
the climax of each story. In "Colorado" I had practi-
cally five such interests, and though the material in the
main was good, it Jailed to joints.

The gathering of this material, however, may have
an interest. My intention had been to write a play about
the Colorado mines. To get the material I had meant
to go to work in one* of them. I didn't believe that any
practical miner would mistake me for an expert. I
planned to get something in a clerical way on the sur-
face of one of the properties or in the sheds. To do this
I went, by the advice of my Rocky Mountain friend,
John C. Montgomery, to the law offices of ex-Governor
Charles Thomas and Harry Lee. Harry Lee, who was
a man of about my own agt% advised against my project.
There had just been a strike* in the mines, and there were
still a number of secret-service men working under vari-
ous guises.

"'In the way you propose/' Lee said, "you won't be

380 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

in any danger, but the men will promptly put you down
as a private detective, and though they wouldn't molest
you, you would never get near them, and the intimate
stuff you are trying for would elude you/'

There was an experienced, practical miner, tough man
and strike leader, on their books by the name of Phil
Flynn. He was a good deal of a free-lance, constantly
moving about on new prospects. If they could locate
Flynn and put me under his care Pd be in the way of
getting the desired information. A long-distance tele-
phone caught Flynn at Colorado City on his way to a
copper district in Northern New Mexico. He waited
over a train for my coming. I had had a rather romantic
account given me of Flynn before joining him. Accord-
ing to the men in Lee's office he had been educated for
the priesthood and had abandoned it:. At any rate, he
had a fashion of quoting Latin. To my mind, after a
few minutes with him, he suggested neither the priest
nor the scholar, but rather the railroad foreman. He
already knew niy business from his long-distance tele-
phone talk, and as we went along on the railroad gath-
ered my purpose in detail. It was decided that I was
not to pose as a practical miner but as a mine-owner in-
vesting in properties. He gave me a few stock phrases
that would partly carry out this impression, and when
in doubt I was to be silent. We stopped at a junction
called Trinidad, where the yard foreman knew Flynn.
Flynn told him I was from Leadville. The foreman asked
how things were up there. I could answer only in the
general way that they were pretty good, but a main dif-
ficulty was the lack of cars. He knew this, and was try-
ing to forward empties.

"Where did you get that car stuff? " Flynn said as

TO COLORADO 1;OR NEW MATERIAL 381

our own train moved on. I told him I had seen it in the
morning paper.

"Well, you'll do, Tom."

In the evening we left our railroad at a town called
Springer, from which we had a few miles1 ride in a stage
to the driver's home, where we passed the night. Next
morning we started with a two-horse wagon for the foot
of the Little Cimarron :- pronounced Simmaroon. A
prospector was camped there with a tent and a few cattle.
Flynn made his acquaintance and left our wagon in his
care- We went up the trail on horseback. At the end
of the afternoon we had got as fur as the animals could
comfortably go. They were headed down the trail again
and started with a .spank. Hynn explained that there
wasn't, any way that they could get lost. They had to
follow the little stream by which ran our trail. No
matter how long it took them, they would bring up at
the camper's outfit where the wagon was.

The kit 1 started with we had left at the stage-driver's
home in the valley, and each carried only a blanket, be-
sides such toilet articles us one could put in the pockets
of Iiis reefer. Leaving Colorado City, Flynn had asked
me if I had a gun. I showed him a .38 hummerless which
he thought would do. Before reaching the mining-camp
he suggested shifting it to the right-hand pocket of my \i

reefer instead of the hip, where I hud it. I le didn't think
there would be any trouble, but though my post4 was
buying certain eopper mines, he was really fining back
to recover these claims, which he had learned had been
jumped by the employees of the big mining company
operating in that district. I learned this with a creepy
feeling in certain peripheral nerves, but have reason to
think it was not betrayed*

^ Tin-:

The camp v\ j:i% h \\ ,
bunk-house ,ir:>! a »-. i ,'.. •
log eahins. i'hr ], i: •
as they were, {•*} I-;',-5:' •
a little |',ang«,u , >,,\; v, •
about. nine i>\ M\. I t. '
lintf f'unks <me .JJI..-M- ;',,
than the ».nliu.ti\ <!-,-. ',.'
pin<- Ixntiths. ()„ ,j,,. ,
ntllal up in thru arnv •,
In the niuf. )„,,, , _ i,
utt-nsils. tJ,,-,,. .,,!

In <>«<• cunu-i i if ti'f i,, ,
over the utlin, r,,i i},,. , .
no aa'onunud.iti. .;» jJt ,^ « .

thcniinrrscaiar in (j.^n ;' ,-
Il«If an Imur aJt.j ,„„ .t , '
One of" tin- jjjuiv w.i. a i ,' , .
twenties, with 0,1, fm,,. ..J<;
turesquea iW»re a-, our 7, ,',,,
was one oth.-r '\inr,u.n,t >t
jlu. j,, - MJ/
amj ^

for himsefr. The ..th,,'

ot owne«i the InuJ,!,,

-< the few Innn, that. tl,

, .....

, '. » ','

The place- Kr«.w ,,„;,,;,; ';•;'••;' ,

the days were *.„„,. A|V| *^ ;

»v

i fi

t-,

.» ,

!!l- U|'rj- "'••• , : ! ',,„«.!
'"'J""-r- I '-- > • •*. .,4i-j th.a

TO COLORADO FOR NEW MATERIAL 383

Flynn and I couldn't stay in the cook-house. Flynn told
him he was wrong about that; his friend Thomas would
sleep on the table; himself he was going to stretch out
on one of the benches and some boxes that he put along-
side.

Without removing boots or any garments, with a folded
gunny-sack for a pillow, and covered by the blanket, I
slept four nights on the kitchen-table. Tin* foreman of
the outfit: would have had authority to oust us, but: he
made no attempt to exert it. The first morning, after a
solemn breakfast, during which nobody but the boy in
corduroy spoke to us, Hynn and I went a mile down the
trail to borrow a couple of picks. The company had
plenty in their blacksmith shop, but refused to lend them.
The blacksmith, when alone, seemed a little more com-
municative and more willing to be friendly with Hynn.

When, after getting our picks and an hour's walk, we
got to the ground where Flynn had located we found that
his identifying stakes and signs had been replaced by
newer claimants. These evidences Hynn promptly de-
stroyed, and set up again stakes with his own name on
them. This done, we put in the rest of our time digging
what in mining parlance was called an assessment. This
is the removal of enough cubic material to meet the re-
quirement of the mining laws, and we were just within
the expiration of the time-limit to do it,

We were in a singular social atmosphere and set of
circumstances. The cooks turned us out the same rough
meals that they provided the company miners, without
any discussion as to the propriety of doing so. The
miners ignored us during the meals, although Phil swore
roundly at the unidentified thieves who had tried to steal
his claims. The cook and his helper were rather poor

HI'

., ' * \ * * " ' » ' ' "

J*r; , ! ? '

A! ••' -•

/'! *.'; ? ?;!, ;: r^ F

! *,

i i

wnj I 4'.', ; I *».*' ^ '.•/)"••
i! ,*!!<-» jjr, ' *v

•*r» !'• r" '.?,-(» I /.,* ' .

* «^J^J . , <,;M .-. /, ,,

. ,- 1 \\,

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. . 1 ^r

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• ' -,-- I ••;? .»«,

fur >4tvJ 1 h
ii4*r% t1j»-
Si J *!»?: Nt

r;i ,M« r

TO COLOR AIX) FOR NEW MATERIAL 385

At Cripple Creek I met interesting characters and
learned nuuii about Bynn, There had boon a fire a
couple oi yeais before while Flynn was absent that
swept the side hills and left men, women, and children
without shclu-r. Bvnn returned when the conflagration
was over, and to his astonishment his little cabin was
the* only «*m' left in that district.

He looked fiver the surrounding misery a moment and
quietly went over to his mvn cabin and set it on fire.
When he rejoined the sufferers he said, "Now I'm with
yi.ni/*

As we went through the little mining city on that first
nij'.ht of our visit we gradually accumulated a crowd of
ndmiirrs. I was in a fair way to make a mistake about
FlyitfA popularity until 1 discovered that, the interest
was- in me. I got Hynn in a corner and made him eon-
irss. Some one had asked the name of his companion.
As a great sreiH he {tad whispered, "Jim Jeffries/* Some
two years before jeiirtes had won the championship from
Biih Ht/siwwuns, had later won from Sharkey, and some
uu»nlhs pt'fvrdiitj4 the time of which 1 write had knocked
out Jamrs J. Coi bet t. On the sidewalks and in the bar-
rooms, nmrh to !;IyunVs amusement, men jostled us a
little unpleasantly. I feared that as enthusiasm mounted
suiw iota! tvlrliitfy would lake a wallop at me in the
hrliei that he wa% measuring his capacity against the
\voild ihawpion. Under a pretense of important letters
I #ot bark to out hotel.

The stutf I j.-,ot from (*iippl<* Creek was principally
character «tudirs. Bv the time we reached Leadville,
IBIynn was f hoiotijjily enjoying the fiction in which we
were* mutu.'dK intt-rrstcd. In that city 1 was introduced
to a man ansiotis In iH-t rid of a gold mine. It became

f 1 13

f T* 1:1 vi *!'*.}: \\i

1 1

t f ,, :i r.
f >M* ^ ,
* k ,«• i M , ii

,, II .- ,

T K !« l

f h r.:.. I IM!; r,%, !. .

i «il|fr% 4t*?i, aK'l ihr

TO COLORADO FOR NEW MATERIAL 387

scaped. After a cold crawl of twelve or fifteen feet we
'merged into the unobstructed gallery again. There was
10 guaranty that the material through which we crawled
vouldn't shift omv more and imprison us, or even catch

is in transit. But it didn't, and after a terrifying hour
ve were U}',ain on the surface in God's free air. I didn't
>uy the gold mine; the best 1 could do was to take the
natter under advisement. But I was so overloaded with
»ensutinns that when 1 came to write my play 1 hud my
.•illain and his guilty partner eight hundred feet under
M'ound, in a eat'.e on a cable controlled by the hero, who
•VMS on the MB face with the damning evidence in his
lands.

When we got hack to Denver, Hynn refused to leave
tie until 1 had hern given safely into the hands of our
:Viend, Many 1 .er. As he .said good- by ^ur the time being
:tr turned to I .re:

"What I like about your friend Tom here is we took
tins two \verk'.1 uip together, and we were in some tough
ulaec's. But he* urvei said once, *\Vhen are we* going to
;>rt nut cif hac?* or * I low long does this last?' He's all

right/*

I confessed to Lee that I'd often thought those ques-
tions, but hail refrained from asking them because they
would tn nouise hasten our departure or terminate
:nir difficult ii-s; and, furthermore, I didn't want Phil
Hynn to think I was a quitter, which in my heart I
was.

Hynn was much interested in stories of the theatre,
und also the things about Fred Remington, and a year
later showed up unexpectedly, but not without welcome,
tit NV\v Rnchrlle.

Remington thought him a veritable nugget, and spent

<:i '-'I * ".'•'>.' v,< i;

*, *

h I

! . , I ,-,.,
M ':K-

• • > i,-

•

V Ml I . '. ''i .1
>.„','! tt.» '', '

.' !: •• . t"

' ., I.i "'i

' 1 . ' - I' t!$

. ' I ' ». .',«•

\l i*u
i ••" :•- i-«»i

IX) COLORADO FOR NEW MATERIAL 389

by his \\ ish for change. Bnmson Howard, after his come-
dies of "Suruu>nu" and "Green Room Fun," wrote
"Hie Banker's Duuj'hter," "Young Mrs. Winthrop,"
ami after another comedy, "The Henrietta/' returned to
serious work in "Shenuwlouh" and u Aristocracy." Gil-
lette wrote his comedies, "The Professor/' "The Legal
Wreck/' then his serious play, "Held by the Enemy/'
and, after a string of comedies which included "Mr. Wil-
kinson's Widows/1 "Too Much Johnson," and 4I Because
She Loved Him So/* returned to serious work in "Secret
SIT vice" and "Sherlock Holmes." Henry Arthur Jones
hud even a wider run#e through outright melodrama and
farce, ranj'jnj', fit mi "The Silver Kinjj" to" Whitewashing
of Julia.*' ( iiyde Fitch, after his lighter social portraiture,
wrote his bii; plu\ , "The City." One will not he accused
of claiming a professional kinship to these masters if like
them he confesses the human side which craves variety.
My own attempts ranged nil the way from melodrama to
musical comedies and broad farce. After the experience
with "Colorado," the reaction was naturally to the
lighter moot Is,

Before "Colorado" was produced, and while it was in
rehearsals, I went one night to the Empire Theatre to
sec* If. V. Esmond's comedy, "The Wilderness." That
excellent company of Charles I-'rohman's contained such
actors, since stars, us Murjyiret Anglin, William Courte-
nay, Charles Kichmun, Mrs. Whiflen, Margaret Dale,
and in a quite minor iV»Ie, Lawrence D*0rsay. My wife
and 1 were* watching I In- play from a box, and when D'Or-
suy left thr sta}.;e 1 noticed a movement in the parquet
like a receding wave as the audience settled hack in their
seats. They hud moved forward in their attention in
less concerted action; but as they heard D'Orsay ap-

THE PRINT OF MY RKMKMBRANCE

{or his second scene their interest was i in me-
diate and the forward inclination was in unison. 1 called
my wife's attention to the fact, and ufiea D'Orsuy came
on for the third time \\c both noticed the peculiar re-
sponse. I felt that tin* player so welcome in such neg-
ligible material a,s hi.-» slight rule oiiVied was of stellar
quafiu.

i knew D'Orsay as an actor v\Ito luid attracted atten-
tion in Captain Marshall's pla\ , "The Royal Family/*
aiui as an interesting personal lifnire ubmit the eluhs.
Mo describe him m a line, one \\ould have to use the*
phra.se su often applied to him b\ his ciitic-,: "The Ouitla
tyju* oi heavy jMiartlsmaa.*' Hr. e\pie'.%ion is the domi-
nant one* o! distinguished, i»patjne, lut/jisli toleration,
alternated with bland astonishment, not unmixed vuth
140-od nature, but al\va\s self-coiifidc-nt, self-suihcient, and
aristocratic. 1 be^an thinkin*'. ab«itit Iiim as the central
figure for a comedy that I had arteet! to \\riir for Mr.
Frohtnan,

On the Ameriean sta}*4e, to |^rt the greatest value* From
such a man as a kind uf o»mic»paper Kn^Iishman t>f !>reetl-
ni|.% it was imperative to surround him \\tlh Americans
and give him an Amnican background. In dulit^ this
1 naturally saw the Americans amused xvitli his speech
and manner as 1 hud %rrtt them awusrd by him in private
life; but us I thought more intimately of him i remem-
bered that his funnirst m«unents were his attempts to
IK* u!tr,vAiurrit*an. lltis phase seemed only incidrntallv
valuable until» through d\\ellinj* on it, thr idea came
to me to put bun in a situation where he uiiiili! lie seri-
ously obliged to assume it altogether, and with the in-
ception of that idra 1 had the bent and the impelling
factor of my story. The eiwstruetion would be along

'O COLORADO FOR NEW MATERIAL 391

ic of establishing an Englishman who would have
tend to be an American, and his experiences after
;an to do so.

were permitted to say to a dozen English and
can playwrights of to-day— Pinero, Jones, Gil-
Polloek, Al Thomas, Forbes, Winchell Smith,
( Maugham, and so on, "What made an ultra-
hman in America pretend to be an American?
*r promptly," • "they would reply In chorus, "A
n." That is the dramatist's formula, and it was

And the dramatists would be agreed on the next
Find the woman.

It that it would be piquant for the woman to be a
widow who had resumed her maiden name. Under
overb this would make her twice shy, while at the
time it would remove her from the ingenue class,
>eing bndly overworked. After considerable study,

must not. be minimized by any ready relation of
nit upon the idea of having my Englishman mas-
king as an American unwittingly take for sufficient
i the name of the girl's divorced husband. This

great find, as any one interested in playmaking
•adily agree. 1 decided that my Englishman should
seen and been attracted by this young woman while
as travelling on the Continent, and that instead of
g to America in search of an heiress his trip should
i? definitely in search of the woman,
ave more than once in these pages spoken of the
of material which seemed to have no significance
4 time of its acquisition. Here's another example:
I't go up in the Ferris wheel at the Chicago World's
in 1893 because I dramatized the wheel sticking
my car should reach the top of the turn. In 1899

392 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

I said so to Maurice Barrymore as we stood looking at
the same wheel transported to and set up at EarPs Court,
London.

"Well, since it's been here the thing has stuck twice/5
said Barry; "one time for twenty-four hours."

A policeman standing by took up the story and told
us how a sailorman climbed to the cars with coffee and
sandwiches for the imprisoned patrons.

"A lot of good stories/' he added, smiling, "fellows
with other fellows' wives, and all that sort of thing."

I expressed my yokel astonishment as to how the sailor-
man could have managed it up to the topmost cars. The
bobby's tolerant answer set the story in my mind for all
time:

"Well, you see, sir, 'is mother'd taught 'im to 'old on
good and 'ard, and 'e did."

The idea of putting two romantic people together for
twenty-four hours in the same car at the top of the Ferris
wheel seemed to me excellent preparation for a comedy.
I adopted it.

When my story was well in hand, newspaper training
impelled me to familiarize myself with the proposed
scenes of it, the three locations in the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel. I stated my project to the business manager of
the hotel, and met a chilling and discouraging reception.
The house could lend itself to no enterprise of that kind.
So two days later I drove to the hotel in a cab with my
wife, and with a trunk and valises. The room clerk had
us shown several rooms and suites. I chose a suite I
thought suited to the earl. The rate, without meals, was
forty dollars a day. We stopped only one day, but the
forty dollars put into my hands many valuable physical
suggestions, as well as the truthful color which is so valu-

Hfe-

TO COIJORADO FOR NEW MATERIAL 393

able in a well-known district. It also enabled me to make
sketches for the scenic artist and get suggestions helpful
in the general construction of the story.

After I had begun to write the play Mr. Frohman had
gone to London. I cabin! him, asking if I might have
D'Orsay f*»r the piece.

With characteristic brevity he answered "Yes/1
My comedy, "The* Ear! of Pawtucket," was done by
the {inic Mr. I'Yohman came back, but the cable for D'Or-
say had meant to him only the engagement of a minor
character. He was warm in his approval of the play,
but declined to risk IVOrsay as the star. I could set* no
other exponent. !''iv»hman generously released D'Orsay.
Two hunts after he had done so I hud completed an ar-
rangement with Kirke Ln Shelle, who took the play solely
upon my description of it, and because he had to move
promptly in order to get. lime at the Madison Square*
Theatre, where !\It/abeth Tyree was starring under her
own management in a play not. very successful. Miss
Tyrce was exactly the type of girl that we wanted for the
heroine, aw! she ha«l the additional attraction of being
the owner of this lease fur the Madison Square Theatre,
While* I was slill in Ln Shelle's oilier, I .a Slielle arranged
for Miss Tyree to hear the play, and before she went to
the theatre thai night I had rend it to her, she had ac-
cepted it, and itfirr giving the following day to the selec-
tion of the company we slutted on the second morning
to rehearse the piece, with only eleven clays between us
and the Monday on which we proposed to open. Among
the company assembled on the stage of the Madison
Square Theiitie lor rehearsal %vas an actor of experience
and ability, Mr. Knie\t Elton, engaged for the part of
the valet, Hr ant! D'Orsay Had been together in an

394 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

English company some fifteen years before in the prov-
inces, and met now for the first time since.

"Oh," said Elton to D'Orsay, "are you in this piece?"

D'Orsay said, "I hope to be."

Elton gradually realized he had been speaking to the
star. The reported episode amused C. F.

We had one of our best first nights, and next morning
a fine press; but our performance had been with insuffi-
cient preparation. Being familiar with the script from
both writing and rehearsing it, I had at the first per-
formance undertaken the office of prompter, and, in order
that I might not be more audible than the players, stood
in the first entrance with a small megaphone through
which I whispered when they seemed to hesitate.

In the second intermission a prominent critic said, "I
like everything about the play except the wretch with
the megaphone."

But feeling that much more depended upon main-
tenance of our tempo than absence of the occasional
note from the megaphone, I stuck to the method. Our
stage-manager's time-card registered our last curtain at
an hour that was not improved upon during the long run
of the piece. D'Orsay starred in the play under La
Shelle's management for three years, and at the end of
that time returned to Mr. Frohman to star in another
play.

Altogether I read or proposed many plays to Charles
Frohman. Some were accepted, many were refused,
both in script and in projected story. Charley one day
said to me: "It's always a great pleasure to refuse a
play of yours, because it seems to get the thing off your
mind, and then we have an interesting conversation."

For my own part, as I look back, I can add that the

TO COLORADO FOR NEW MATERIAL 395

pleasure was not altogether one-sided, because Charley
never refused a play or a story without proposing sonic
project for another one.

When ho turned hack the script of "Pawtuckct" and
released D'Orsuy from his company in order that 1 might
do the play elsewhere he said: "As soon as this is off your
mind start in and write me a comedy for John Drew, and
if you can I'd like you to put a part in it for Lionel."

Drew had recently had great success in a play called
"The Mummy and the Humming-Bird/1 in which his
nephew, Lionel Barry more, had the part of an Italian
who had no English words and ventured on few Italian
phrases, hut trusted to convey most of his meaning by
eloquent pantomime.

CHAPTER XXII
IN PARIS

I think Lionel Barrymore's fundamental ambition in
life was not so much to be player as to be artist. Every-
thing in black and white or on canvas or in stone interests
him intensely, and for two or three years he left the stage
to devote himself to the study of color in Paris. In the
theatre his happiness is delineating character, and he
goes at each new subject with the technical interest of
an artist interested in surfaces and in the force behind
them. He made his first big impression in New York by
playing an old Boer general in a melodrama done at the
Academy of Music. The part was a prophecy of his
gallery of old-men portraits made notable in "The Cop-
perhead" and again in "The Claw/' For his Italian
with John Drew he had taken lessons from a master in
order to be right in the few phrases he had to ejaculate,
and he had gone into the Italian colony to study the
manners of its people. It may be that C. F/s commis-
sion to put in a part also for Lionel centred my attention
more than the obvious commission to get a story for
Drew. At that time, to see Kid McCoy, champion mid-
dleweight fighter of the world, and Lionel Barry more
together no acquaintance of either would mistake one
for the other. But the mistake could easily be made if
either was seen alone half a block away. I began to think
of a prize-fighter. In order to get a thoroughly contrast-
ing part, I chose a minister of the gospel. I was indebted

396

IN PARIS 397

to the current newspapers for that idea, as there was
some young clergyman at the time in the public eye
through his advocacy of athletics.

There was no haste for the play. My friend RuckstuII
was settled in a little town called St.-Leu, some fifteen
miles out of Paris, working on his heroic equestrian statue
of Wade Hampton. Letters from him carried the allur-
ing post -cards of the city beautiful. I was a little track-
sore with New York, and mentally a little weary with
the vociferous self-approval of the National Administra-
tion. My boy and baby girl were beginning to lisp
French, perhaps wrongly, from their uncertain bonne.
My wife wanted to pursue her musical studies. I thought
it would be fine to have an occasional half day in some
Parisian tifrltVr. "Ari/ona1* was doing well. D'Orsay
was making money. Letters of credit seemed possible I
Paris !

There are too many guide-books of Paris, too many
accurate pictures of its beauties too many interesting
and rattuifitte descriptions of it from Dumas to Du
Manner, for an American playwright fatuously to at-
tempt further to encumber the field. Bui for a man
momentarily escaping from America, and especially from
New York, there are some attractions that have not
bent cininirriitrd,

An -editor of n Western paper, recently writing of a
local improvement society and of the conditions of in-
dividual premise's says of one citizen: "There is no hy-
pocrky about Brown, lie is not one of those men who
beautify their front yurds and leave the back yards filled
with ash-euns, rusty tin, and disorder. No hypocrisy.
Brown's front yard is just us dirty as the back one/*

New York has that kind of candor. When a visitor

398 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

debarks from a steamship and comes through our water-
front streets, whether from Hoboken or the North River
side of Manhattan, he has a ride through a front yard
that prepares him for all the dump-heaps of the rear,
broken pavements, dirty gutters, tumbled tenements,
ragged hoardings; and then through our necessitated but
oppressive canyons, where the sky-scrapers shut out the
sun for all but a few minutes of the day. And if he hap-
pens to be a home-coming American from Paris he groans
inwardly with a despair that he knows no effort of his
own lifetime can lift. Having made one such round trip,
I looked on Paris for a second time with a knowledge of
these American features and a wish to find the elements
that made the great contrast.

One principal item is sky-line. The building laws of
Paris fix the limit of houses definitely at six stories, or
twenty metres, sixty-five feet. The mansard roof is an
intelligent effort to observe the letter of this law and yet
steal a few additional vertical feet under the allowance
of roof. As property is valuable, the legal limit is uni-
formly reached; but monotony is avoided because the
race of architects turned out by the Beaux-Arts, where
we send our Americans to learn the rudiments of their
profession, has found a variety in the unity that makes
for restful beauty. Again, the poverty of Paris in its
water-supply seems to result in another blessing. The
water in some of the mains is not potable, as they say,
pas de la source, and the Parisian is as lavish with it in
the streets and fountains as he is economical of its use
in his bathtubs.

Every morning, in every block, a street-cleaner turns a
little rivulet through the gutter, dams it into a little lake
with a bunch of burlap, and with his long and homely

IN PARIS 390

broom of osiers sweeps it over the wooden pavement
levels:, washing baek the debris to the run and gradually
extending rivulrt and lake until he has accomplished his
bioek. The morning gutter and the sky-line call atten-
tion newly to each new day,

And then this third item: Intelligent Paris recognizes
and admits lite eye as an organ., It is not to be more
lawlessly availed than is the ear. No man for cummer-
eial jnu poses shall without restriction assault the passers*
attention with his blatant demand. The twenty -four-
sheet stand, the bar bane three-sheet poster do not exist,
beeause the munieipality puts a tax upon every shed of
paper that, solicits its attention. Advertising spaee is
relatively as valuable on the walls as it is in the news-
papers, and so posters are artistic* of more than ephemeral
value, and are in the main confined to handsome little
kiosks set up at interval*, for their aeeommodation.

\\hen will Aim-lira U-arn this value of public right?
When will all the unsightly boards that eonitne our rail-
way joiunev • to hidmus :dtr\s of proelamatory and man-
dalui\ atlav'L* be tej.ul-ited by proper assessment tinder
Mate domain to things of tolerable sightliness and sourees
o! revenue' t*» the JMHU publie whom they alfliet? When
will uitoiic*mlin^ i-iti/ens be peimitteil t«i travel and look
hum ihrii ear wiiidu\vs on letic-.hinf* Ian<lseapes without
briiif* euiiiin;i!!i!rd to use StiUtum^. Alarm (lloek or
Sokum\ Condnrnf Mill? \S h\ mu- 1 there always be
tufeipMsrd In'twrrn the niininative indivi<lual and the
sirnuj^iapfn <*f his M.ikei i he i'ommeieial persuasion of
his fellow iiutiu moiu-v mad?

To our wititnf, Jui the theatre Paris i% always rieh in
Mi^^rsiion. Linlr j>Iavs thai have not the importance
in get into /.'//iWrufimi, or even into the printed

THI;, HUNT c»i' MY iu*;\fi<;\fB!u\c;K

lir«K*hur«\ tlmuutu" i*it*. thit jjr\,rj w J.<- t'»rir way in
Auu'tira, air at thr -mall ?hr ifjr . ^:i ? ?<»* 1» » «l'<vai»K ami
tin- hav k .trrrt', at;,* I in thr Oui'.'rj a.i>! in M nitmaittv*
MHI*' than halt' »»!' t;*"i» «-<M,iiM'v, r,i« h -. *iiir hnlr M^**
K*",tivr, tii fir ',*r.v*r thai oKiaV* ;i^I nt^r,. Whnt 1
{i;ti} tin l)j*'U*U,tn '• w<it«* j»(i** Kni Jir*i I *.rnt it nvcr ti>
(!f i\ !»> tnai! tjntli-i thr tirlr *»! f< I'hr Pu^, anif ihr I^r-
sun/* Htui tnulrr th.it titlr it ^ *• ann- ^uu'r-l, Hut hrfun*
r*«'t *»%n t«* irfi^.n ,/' 1s \1». l''j'«h?n,iu ha*! iriYivn!

ui-viin'-t llu- as-.fn Liti'*!i. H*- h^-1 a t.iuui jrlurTatUT In
li.i* t!i«'ir dvplr.f.ui*-, aM-l .t1^1! • lfj! 1 '4 n;?!>, .fit.itl far
llir l!l!«% J'rrliM/. tlia^ J'ir ^"i-l "iMf.^u" uai* lint MI
%;irr^%,i!t^'l that «*:?r in:, h* n-«* u-.- t1, f't: * v*f,h *»J course
Jill'\4!!i^L \Vr t iljr.l th* )«1 4\ " t t»r < >n Vl ( *'l!/*

Cl l\ fr!l ih, if l? ^.njj.i'/t .!-* IM pi' th» A intu thf
putt «»t' thr jura* hu» h'.'«ir\r/, IM- t'rr f!?r «haiav'tt*r»
ulth«»u^h an njual p.u! i:\ tlr pl.r, \ \al-ir a»ul in thf
wiiiin^,* i'»»tiM H"t h»*tn it'* *rn Liiii t'«r;^u»r uiih the

i'}$4!4i'!t4t it! thr ptj^;Jrl, It* !• '«•", r-1 th.t* Hat t

n^, tin 4%'Jk ia""''l with hi*> MU* !<** \I%. Ih^s'i, ^ »
|lio%r H!I*» ju^^l .'ipi-tlj* ;,fcU , ! * ]»*.'« Luru thr
Ifl^ii llir Jirttri a** *f» whm ti^- l,i» V* "^ouM hr thai ill
llii't plav* u% in ** 1 hr Muwwv :4^>l thr I !uinfii!!i^-ilifif*
lir IiatI Mtilv thr itlMtr %!JMA \ juit. It ^ a » ifirirfMS** llr*
fiiirtl IH k«*f4p LJ^^f ! a^ thr jm*/Ji'.t an»l j«ut MISJU* uvui!«
nl»U* I<%hi*iiii|t Ji^in in thr |utt ll^-i! haJ hrrji mrat*! f***!*
t\tl\ Dl'rtt, t'lauk \V*»|thi:i/t % »r, r?if;,iftir'! l»»i thi., :$Jlil 1

havr t»"\ri srrat a wan.v.rr ni tvr *Aith in^ir ruthu*.iaMU
\n }*ri an a'lwjuatr ^nrup.pjv.

1 inn MMIV l»> l««i,'rt l!itfc ti.niir ti! thr pi i\ ill Vblurh t
vriv hrautitul j'irl «il that Unir }4a»i in:i4r an Jwjizrvann.

This girl was Diiiti l)r Wt4t«\ thr r, tjr nf I;!%ir Df

IN PARIS 401

Wolfe's brother. There was sonic slight domestie-in-
!aw difference that made these ladies not agreeable to
i*aeh other, and the wish to see them both in the same
?ust piqued Frohman's sense of humor so much that he
set about the seemingly impossible task of persuading
the two ladies, with the result that the valuable co-opera-
tion of both actresses was obtained. Selina Fetter, who
had been a favorite New York leading woman when she
married Fdwin Milton Royle, was induced to take a part
somewhat more- mature than those she had previously
.shown in. For a young reporter, Richard Bennett was
engaged; ant! Mich excellent actors as Joseph Wheelock,
Jr., Ralph Dehnoie, and Joseph Whiting, together with
Jessie Uusley and Mavi-ie Firlding, then one of the great-
est favorites of the \audeville theatres, were also engaged.
The Criterion Theatre, in which we were ultimately to
play, was rixnt to us' for all our rehearsals. That one
should inrnt iMii this mav pu/./Ie the layman, but such
conditions an* not al*Aa\s provided. I think the rule is
to the cnntrarv; th;t! the' majority of plays are moved
about in tin if iehe;U'-als from «>ne theatre* to another,
and cKvusiunallv into some hired hall. There is a great
advantage in leheat-.ing in thr playhouse in which you
are to open, ant! getting alwa\s the proper tonal values
and the phv steal relations- that are to be undisturbed
and unrevised.

As SOCHI as Lionel knew In4 was cast for the pugilist
he hunted up Kid McGiy and passed much oi his time
outside the theatre with the champion. This admiration
was reciprocated, and when the play opened McCoy
came often to see his counteifeit presentment. One dif-
ference between Ban1 v more and McCoy was that the
Kid's hair was as einK as Lionel's wa.s straight. For a

4o> THF. rUI\r 01- MY KI-Ml MBR\\CK

period in the i rK lull M} 1-e i»'«iv. a'ld 1»»I all I Ll!u\\
tlaiin. .ill t\ / iu\ he v>a in !„ 1 ,"'iei I; i*{ !,i , hair nrti-
tieialK Ufihi1 i u !i r\i':iii i?t Midti pinpiiL fu piesent
t hi . tiiin aat> :i d fa .» *t «*«'.

I Siau* ua»'ft to lilir.e thit an ft^tri ja,f imlk'uU*tl
In \lt. \\hitluL, »*.!i'* iia;iri f"a iff'il a i'lMta^trr just
irltM .rt! } nan tKr ta!»lr .^ rj< i « ^a»l ni.ilt » »<nc^ an i prra*

iitianiiiitl tin III!!' rlU r "I rl! i i « ,r, ! : r ti, ,t Illiir llnl
jihi'i!» *:nri) »n '.** i pi* f7«*»«l Jt.» !lf»' Ti*^!jr. I In* li%t" n{

* ill' ihui »i « t!-ri a . aa a ( » !i,i . '»* i1 t!« - I !^<n MIL r thiu*

• iih r I'J*' (.hi! \\ji, t^4<! w« i*^ tii^:L ii vfi*!!i iiiM'4 uf
fhr t»la\ • i*i'^!. * I ';"»i !:'il Iraf. la t! r ii'cMi.als
t tt ll'l , -.i i rii' \\ In «!'**•, IP '?i l!i,t:i MH r *«!ii iMl 1 • *,ui-
if Tt»ln I*: . j*air. ia-I.i k- r , that !fir t1! «L^I* !iai» r - 1 was
a lin/ u! lura /.»ir *\ fi.it* ! in-i u:m i!1 i*.il In had
UrM-i l.ikt it r!!'i i , ai.'l IM Ka* I 1 *.»* i IM ;» . at *I, -.»» \alh
thr la*!^ «»t \li , S i* Inn an hr v, a h: .k * * j MM • u i*!«*«l.

In l*ati., \!im! vMtt*M hoi ;<» 'i , ! : :»» t»ui tirli, hinl
atlfiiliMii ihr n»*\rlf, ••! 1 •' 'MI*! \lrj; , *., v, It. i tflalril
|M Sul i»», Onr ul Hit" r %iuf ii8 , i \ i!i -! ** 1 hr I'M iti-*n of
Pcyf% HaijMi/' II n*Lt!f an a./1 n'. jal*fi:l tia'uinjj
M! \li-/, l*i \ \, rM :i l*» ihi M..I . h*iii., i*f hn < Kin and
*»thii ap,*aif * th t*. .4 *jiti»ni* j»n -i.il In* ^ ; thr >ri«-al
hit 4 fin* \«mn,< !.•»!», in 1 uud«»n 111 thf auth»«i**. pla\f
and thru thr uuamu,«*u . ^ uunju-ni **S if «" }ti* * »*; «*u lh^%t*

drlt; jiltlll i-haiai tfli .U» ' , iliiM ti4«j»'u, at»»l the lli,r Hllil
ihr atilhui*4 ^ic-at /«NI*| i»jt.;.se in liintiu^ an rxjuwrni

\\l\n pu» • i ,' f*d ihfin and t!ii"i«!n *.,r«itl hi * pinr im»tt
iailuir* I tain v thi* r. u»»t an uzr.r.'j.d rv^rnnur uith
playH'ii/jii » \Jiu !ia\r pu*»! n c idra . aiul ^Juc!ii«it their
own plays,

As I hnvr wiiurii ill eat Her pa;tes, I w;i*; t»li!i;*ed t<* |!*»
buck tu I*uris a day or two aflei we nju-ned at ihc4 (,»t>

IN PARIS 403

;crion; but before I left Barrymore's success was so
pronounced and his identification with the part seemed
;o permanent that Frohman asked rne what I thought
>f featuring him in the play. Of course, with my ad-
niration for the boy and my older friendship with his
>arents, as well as a sense of justice, I was delighted with
t. "The Other Girl" was produced late in December,
[903. Ethel Barry more was at that time playing at the
rludson Theatre in "Cousin Kate." I saw her the fol-
owing summer at her Uncle John Drew's house at East
ilampton. The first vivid experience she had to report
:o me was of a night in midwinter when leaving the Hud-
;on Theatre to go home she had encountered on Broad-
vay a billboard on' which was a great stand starring
Lionel Barrymorc, her brother. Ethel said she was so
^leased that tears sprang to her eyes. I was able to tell
icr then of her own first night in "Captain Jinks" at
:he Garrick, when her father and I leaned on the bulk-
icad of the filled theatre.

Then Barry's eyes were full of tears as he turned to
ne and said: "My God, isn't she sweet?" And she was.

In my first saunter through my recollections, and
through the contemporary suggestions that were about
me for the search of a subject for the Drew play, my
attention— not for the first time — -went back to the little
'Constitutional Point" that I had written for Mr. Palmer.
It was unsuited to my needs, but its ultimate usefulness
was not to be overlooked. After leaving my engagement
with Bishop, which had been the inspiration for the little
piece, I had been more and more intrigued with the sub-
feet. The basis for my information was in the series of
books written by Doctor Thomas Hudson, of which his
"Law of Psychic Phenomena" was the first. I was there-

THE

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nil H Inn f btvtf ir »»r that »»f p » : « e .

au't'^tr*! »• ! Mr srll'.r • *{ !" r It - '

plinl, atui nr\ i-j in anv v. ' > f« f : *
rHprtnnml »»n \\hal nu, '.! » i « 1

thria|irutii' Mile- t »t i! .

sprint man*, rxmnu", \'«i!H uu- r*
at llir !i»'!r! anil flM-\\ IU-H , r* ' - '
nnl vrt th« a* »n/!i!v I.IUIH }u i * \

us. 'I hrtr r. in h» «lh llu- hi , , < « ' ;i
thin,* ajij^oarhiin* !ii\'4!i4 ** "I I
trlrjialhv hail tni llu-m a »>! ' 4 ! a

f.'ai..*nl, sit iMilati'ii a*» f*> r.t\« tv * 44 ii *r nt »i;,

llsprvt, lull inn riThrlrs1. »U'!n * In !l*r »*!»! ( »t}r Buiil<*«

vanl, c»a Sr^Hui A\nmr i < u It !•< sn» » t, IP* rr \sas to
thr rrar »i %tH-!i«.m of lltr I!IMH r * !f *!!vs ll i Ii vi I »*t sunu*

a t«'ur, hut
' . T .uit it iia-
« >\ i .ill fni any

.t • f t . -i\ i* or

» .»! 'lh«'t Jack*
urrj. « a » with

l*iiit ^rir cn-

strps. \\V ttrrr t >n that iilf!f n * // i"j'H . ! *» i iflfftiftg
to %«iiiirhutiv*% '.tati-tnrnl and «!iin«»i !i *'! >n <4 tlir |>os-
sihiiilv til making a prj\*ia in h«»nt i»} ».i:r in an awlu*nct*
cuasfimj*. u{ tlir |fa/r «if an"t!jrr a! a «!i.taru.T hrhinti
him. 1'hr ht>ys pruposrcl thr r xpriiinrnl, lu make it

IN PARIS 405

cliilicult the> selected a woman in the fort* part of the
restaurant paiquet who sat with hack squarely toward
us. We agreed upon her by hat and furs, and the like,
and then conforming to instructions instead of merely
mentally commanding the lady to look around, we in
our minds definitely dramatized her doin^ so and focused
thought and attention on her. In the time in which one
can perhaps count ten, with a gesture of great annoyance
the lady faced sqnarclv about and glared at us,

I have referred in earlier chapter to a natron of the
theatre whose theories were so reassuring Mr. Thomas
B. Clarke, a connoisseur and art collector. Men who
know Mr. Clatke, and knu\v Ltm intimately enough to
call him Tom. will understand my taking any excuse,
however risky, to have an hour in his emttuany. For
some reason dm in-; this winter, tgo$, in Nru York he
wanted me to meet hi-, fiiend, Mr. Frederick (Jebhnrd.
As I remembei, Mr. (tchhanl liad requested the* meet-
ing* which was In be at a vrr\ small dinner at his home
then on tin* ea*.tnn '.idr »»f Paik Avenue at about Thirty-
ninth Street. I went with a fairlv keen interest, wonder-
ing somewhat f.tlttoir.K if Mr, (iehhard knew anything
of my St. I, out-, new '.paper reports uf his visits there.
As I recalled them, thrv ueie ratlter cumplimrntarv
than otherwi'.e, except lor a hideous* woodcut issued as
a portrait. But a man ab«*ut lovui woiil<l hardly invite
11 person to a MIJ ill dinner pailv in order to assault him
for that offense attn \n manv \r;ir% had intrrveiied. It
was a fine little dinni*r, aiian/rd by an rf Client cfief
and aceompanietl bs ^^oud wine.

I had last *.een Mr. (»e!ihai«I in tSH.^ twenty years
before, then \\eai in/ Use title- of liie Kin|,t of Dudes, He
was now a widdie-a^eil, re-,eived» and serious gen

H/I mi: tiu\r OF MY HI MI<,MIWVM:K

I fir li

? t !•,,,«,:*•, U;i rtth-
<", t.^tii V.,K tin*

"111! ,-Jr, ,>0

j,3» ' 'i>r t- •?
Ii HMM". 4

|Mf 4 |ii'\ Jnl
Ml, I'l^JmuU
' 1ml li,r Ut»
inr, A ij'n«»fi
i;i? \\t !'*» a }i'-

ot tlir p!;rf ?,-;;!i! ?"• ,1 fil-i-
With thi* M^'-rt '^^Ju.Ui, < H

4 ^

J P*M " I l:>r Oilier

Ml,

If*-

tr >*. ^r

IN PARIS

407

n ;Ui .

ua% j|,»

nMllM

p in j

\!iMuM
|(l ||jr

;i,a! IUM) .
I lltf. .;

,,} ,, , i ]i,
;ij.,f hi I

hid DM A

\\ t f ,.

,i,t- J * «

i *f,i i r ht*j suspicions; the matter \vould
41 41 »•;•,! « <f i *at, Awl tlu'n again my reeol-
« * ^*' C it ',!^j!ti *'iuytevted having obstacles
*;»'.' i\ I found those obstacles in a
., IM a prifunct try suitor Tor the girl,
; in !j: vft-nt father, who, unlike the girl,
-if •! thr -hai ,*.rs» ami so cm. As one
)• '«i\ !n i!i \\a>% t'nmi the portrait, I

!',* h ^** tallrd Ml)e Laneey," was
t .t'f a vn. Juim Drew had come
14 »?i I "fidi iu and tn^rthcr the two
«• ! ;i*i!i \\iih inr and listen to the
, '*'.hut 'ti n»H Boulevard Mont-
• < ..ilr du DMIIU . Juliu felt that he
• I <*< J'»«r !tr iliiiila'd the four flights
, ,t ! li.'hiua't, «ho didn't take eoek-
i. ui in tlu' littlr i-atr ;i|^itnst the bar of
" ,i !*»»,» i H ia It iiiali>^ar got such pos-
5"i ?|jrt .5,! tiritn i;t! . ;t » the small stock
, ,1"-* :-d. Ilir ua'llail, made in a
v /h .i ;* »»»n, ^a- \\aun and long and
? .iJ^i a h.ud thtv in I «»mlon, a night

» I. \\Lfit I!M-\ irai-hr«l our apartment
.^ »] * T «»»di n i li.iii bv the hat-rack

" • '•*- ^^ ahindunrd lati^Ii because
»» L"- <>i^ -i >4iir^ a large eoektail-
, i ',. ' • !a * \Utiliui, cold and pn»per,

- i1' i'«t Ihi-ninical but not dtscjuali-

V •• . I'i.'-tMr, and latrr when I was
*' : /': i^^ f!^'lr tta% ttl lhe WllKh~

HI I'KINi' Ul>' \\\ HI Ml MMiA\<,K

/.a*

fi* 'v»>4»1 I i, '. " 4
a* » rtrl M! n i I s.-'., •
turn -Hi fN' /*' !^J:
lr'\.',, *', ?. ti'ia. <
Tiv r,4" .- -t t? :•. i

\ $ ' a '

! t

n 1 \ r S*

|r vi a * au
..-jM'<, f

\»*a? *

If IV

Iiii*!% at la.)
V«hnr llir V- ,t!

fftr *»aJul i!tM«i

IN PARIS 409

sonic other listeners at Knst Hampton of a dinner at-
tempted some ten \ rars hrfore at our house in New Ro-
eht'He. At that ratlin1 dinnrr ten guests were expected,
making a total juiu of thrive. All hut one were
coining from Nru V»ik (!it\. 'I here was a blizzard on
the day set, and thr «mls j'.w.t to arrive was a laxly living
in New Koehcllr. Sin- did iu*\ reaeh the house until
neurlv niiu o\I«nk in the r\nttiH;% and was then in the
arms of fin maihman. l!ir coupe in whieh she had
passed neail* an h««ui ti\ifv. t«» eovrr a tjuarter of a mile
was stalled in thr • HMV, Hihi t»n our lawn.

\\lirit tin' Kui* v. ;i ihi\\iii «>ut ami revived, and as
wr faced thr /MV. n*. ami UT .dtrtl ulmt»tuls, this solitary
guest on nu n, ti. a,»l '•» m\ ^Itia un my left, **H you
were* to put thi *'U fhf *4af/* n«»h'»dy would helieve it/*

llu*rc ua§. a tt\ifuir i»t «'iii tal»K- that luvame an e(-
fective pii'pnts in a IIT «l .ut, I hi. vsas a hole some
eitrhtten tia hi-. \*juai» , ui*.i iu mnttaiv t«> the expostula-
tions of out I«K al i .tipf !it« i 1 had t itl in the centre of the
tiiltlr. In thi -»|»MP» v,a. hitfd a copper pan that
euuftht thr *!nft }i'»,ti a iin\ t«»uut*»in that ontfd play
over '.t«»ur* and trin* \\lird we had xi-.itors or lelt senti-
mentiil «tur,rUr,. If ^.r, a pntri't little fountain, rcgu-
luird uiiclri thr ublr !»\ a k*^ which n«> man ought to
expect n wmu.in ti» ir.n h» ;tf^f it worket! satisfactorily
nine timr* out «»f tri\ »«i until a hit of dirt or sotne aquatic
iirrrt K»»t infn it1. pi:'h'»!r n»i//tr. llini it spurted eecen-
tticalh and wa1* a H% .lai l*»i»J liiiii|%

Onr ni/iiT li.iin'r. \\ J . *n had the attention of the
euwpaus :ui«l «.*•' ^^!- ^l a . «»,»d st.»iy \vhrn flu* fountain
touk onr tit Thr .1 til ,. I i,r ,Mr;im -.tnu'k fair and square
on thr "lift I»'*.MW »»i !i - «in •> shirt antl made a noise
like lain **a it i*Mif, t!««mjMU> tuhlrcl«»ths are long, and

I'ill' HUM 01*' \1V

M1WWK

hi-. ..*ou, 11.- lw<\ uj* ),;,

"' tv * ' " , ', ' f " • A ' * , t ! i f if

\\ ur". ! ^ n * ,'• •/ • <*\ i ' ", - .

Hi i JiJ n 'A ' ,'"* n • ./,? ,-;-, i1^ ' 'f

J! '*..^ .,; ,; ) , ' rj.,-, - .,/ 1

I ;.^i/ v, 4 , af I -i t 1! i- :,/ -
**v,» M| ihrtn, I i* :! ih •'.; , ,

« ! * i „ % 1 " ^

jtiUr *-l* i** 13 *tr, i * u#* \ Ifi4*t''

• - -J ^ ' " " * j - ' I.U * jl

' 0 •. , 1; "\\. \. ,,;;;,.,

•..; ' . D . •. I" .i'.| :>..n

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* « " W 1 ?

V " * ' , . ' >, I ' 4 i ^

i, i, * ','-»" <• [ .1 ' , t3l

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^ f .ik

nil . ' ? - "' ', t • " ' i j, i u

i*A li v. 4 . a '--.. •' -
* r:u,n/ , 4 4 a >" <.

l?rir! M,, h » .,1%'^142!' f f \

1 *«*• 'fe ! -,"* pi ; f • "';, V :
l»v l!r*f, in,i.'jf II u; L *'j.^ '
u.'i«|r llir l.t'lv lifv;^ i r, ;
1>\ llir V"*;M. huuus *fir f iT

IN PARIS 411

lJu. inuiHti I. nU v.ttr inn«»ernt, but which was sufii-
ninth *!" t» •»!«»! in ir» in .1 pie .rotation. Then 1 drove
l|lr ^ ,,-,;!',, IM rs an au hiu * t , into the house from a near-
{^ j?l5i jo it !» ih'HH\ iin.iA in ut tin* ^tit's presence or of
ihr pi«»i»vi*'i *'''<Mi'i until in* annex. With the people
liviw-' ^l *hr IiMn-.r and the falhrr auti mother of the
husii-^s urn! tl;r jr.iiuus liiishaiul of flu* married lady I
hail j>r»tplr rnnn/Ji li»r H %!«>!¥. ! cannot repeal a play,
nut rvr-ii ,H pi'*?, in tln-.e jiar.«-^ l»ui Iirlieve I have here-
with »*iveu t-n»tii,/.h t** indicate' the -.pi i-lttliness of the sub-
ject ami ihr -.uiiu !.-J:rv »»f thr !i!a!rii:t!.

\\ltrii tht- i-»inr«!v wa-. d«>nr, uf'fcT stniu* six weeks of
rather inlnr.ivr v, lit in/, we callinl it 4*Ntrs. Letlinnwell\s
B.tuis/1 l-'i.ihin.in nnmrdialrly accept etl it ami told me
In- \vnuM win- uu- t" Paii'. whrn time and a place in the
llit-aiir--. wrir iin»- t"» if. I camr iiver the4 next mitlwinter,
\\iu-n I t'»uiid ih»- ja«li.ini C. l;. with another one of his

i.Ui:i"i'«linaiv * *'•!•• lf m;l% ^ wav wilh NIn i:ruhman
to %rr uni«-i v.ni/rd ahilit\ in a \Mtm^ woman and quickly
Fi\r firr upp..ituniur-, ti. {n-ivr lirr woith to the ptlLliC
Thnu^h liH-M- Mji|i-i!iMntir% omld hr devisrd, it wasn't
ahva.v^ p»^-.il,lr 'tu tuakr ihr pui-iu- ncvept tlie lady at

}|t, r,li!li:i!r ,,f hrl. Mv ircnllrcthili is that wllfU ^thc

puiiliv hail l.tih-d. lio^rvru C F. was more nearly right

than ihr j/rnn.d jni v.

Suth a r'ii! ii.-i'l c-'jur imd.-r his atlrnti«m at that tune

in'thr jiri'^n M! Jav Daws a Sft^t intrlt^rilt actress,
with a mrih...I iM-ii-.ijr. .1 Httir t.*«. driicati* if anything,
h had IU..M- th«- .j^.dii', M| !hr iiiuiiaiuir painters atten-
ii,,n to Mihiinx, -i:.d tM drtail-. than is rfirctive in the
,,la>!iou-.r. wlmh i.-.p-s^N Hiuir rraclHy to the broader
t.m'i-hr-, M«. linhitMn Ul -^trrra hrr in "I.:uly Roscfs
phin /' fraluird lin iu ** Ihr \Vhitrwas!«»K ui Julm

41.'. II U<. HUM 01 MY Ht:\S! '\IHUA\CI-

.t
!.

\1 IK

Mi,, 'I

K/, M- It ••

\ \

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,C. < :!-. ,. » . 1 J',

.! M,.- I i , . 4 \

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i -'is'.*!-: 'i' r , ,»•-, i i.r j ,' • I

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in i • ". ' f a : ^ . < i - ,

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t •' '. '• ' J „ i • ,', ,

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1 '' '"-"' ••'..:•'

lit I'!? '. Jj ? r , ,

' Ihr Olhrj (,!il."

! •• ,r , .,tt ,.iif,

IN PARIS 413

C. K said tn him, ** \Vhut arc you doing there?"
** 1 want in luuk at the scene, Mr. I'Yohman."
"\\V1I tr!l \t»u about that/* and the functionary dis-

lippraf ed,

Out dtrv, rehearsal for "Mrs. I,efiing\vell*s Boots1'
\\as at fhr Sa\»»\. (,*. F. ami I were alone. The presen-
tation piticredrd exactly as a first ni^ht, with every for-
maht \ < >bst r\ rd.

\\hrii the first act \vas over he said to me, "These
pe« >ple ai eu*t ael ni;\.**

It wa*. a pietts e»iui]>iiment ti> tlu* eompany, and I
tiied Ti> steal '.nine u}' it fur the author; hut that was
enlneU a mrutal pnii'rss. \\Iien our last etulain iellt
(", I1', had if taL.ru tjp a^ain; the* e«»mpany was called
on the •.!.!, e and in a few heaileninf..; and sineere phrases
he t'»Id them how hifdilv hr <4st iinated their work. There
\\a*« it* * iH'fd at our iirst pcrformanet* to reverse his opin-
ion. I like io irt'tir in my llioiifdtts to that engagement
and in that happ\ family of playrrs, and 1 like to write
a!imil it, Th«r,r idral eonditii^ns are what every player
drram*. of whm he onurs into the theatre and what, every
p!a\-Aii.'ht ha-, in mind when lie sets down a line. Noth-
ing is \o liralih-^.ivinj', and beneficial as this full, uniin-
prdrti r\pir,-^*n and interpretation.

In *f I hr I1, ui of1 R-uUfii'let/ of wliieli I have written
a'"U\ D'U, ,!/• Mu-ir-A was marked. When lie had
pl.i'.rd it wrll into thr thiid \rar and there was only what
was callrd thr small time open to him he grew anxious
for aiioilirr vrhu-lc. ami felt that !u* could make better
monrtarv anan^rinrnts elsewhere than he then had
with i,a Shrlle. Mr. I'iohmun had revised hi.s measure

4i4 THE PRINT OF MY KFMKMBRAXCE

of D'Orsuy and now regarded him as nf stellar ma;>nitn
I was commissioned to wiite him a siuvev^n' in slp;
tucket/' D'Orsay's ambition made him ask al*-o fn;
mure substantial purpose in the plav. The insi \e?'s
of ** The Kmbassy Ball*' \\as, in t'»»iiMu|nrfHi\ a four-,
play, mainly attempting eoinedv, but \\ith a quite seiii
nutt* at the end of its ihild avt. Our tu-.t ni,-ht \vas
New Haven. Mr, Fiohman ci»uld imt attend. lies,
he \\cnild base his upini»»n ot tin* ]->Ias u:tin-Iy up«»n i
tel<*;.*t'ap!ue r<'pt»rt <*t its nvrpt i» »nk a.nd iii»l upi»u !
nt»tu*es «»r opinion-, he wunld -ft in»m nthi'is.

I wned him, MA di/jnftrd in «'..!/'

1 here is hltle value m y^in,.\ mt«* flu- rea'-^ns for f
result, One ol thrill, h*»Vkevet, h.,s.!« iv.trjr'.t. lln* eiui
the ihird aet \\as a \\ell~driinrd I'Mnlih ! bft \\ren a *.inis
interest in the play and IVOr.av, vJi»» had t!ie IUT
elenu'tit. The ehmas, o{ thr. i^nflii! ua-* diainj.fi.-rd
I)*t.)rsay's teaiin/, tiMin some di; «!«>;:;at ii' ler.-id the 1
that was the vital issue. Tfii% he <lid undn thr iliet»*ii
eneotira^.ement. nt the t^haiavter pla\»-il bv that r\rr!L
cumedian, 1 1 any 1 Jarwond. I )*( )i -,a\ e»unplai!ir(! f 1
his snppiut at tin* seiiuns m»*n»rnt v«as n«»t -/aiiu'ie
I iiere \\as v»mr ju*.tu'e in hi-, i laim. Har'Ai^d e«»nteju
that there wasn't matt^iial in hi-. line-. l«» r\«»kr the ;
plause that we* expeeted. In n\\ <»vsjj •npirii*«ii the f,
i*t l!u% pieee was s«> \\ell settled that v, hrl!i»-r Haiwt
\\as ii|!,ht or vu* \\ere n/!ii i-r»tiKl not aliei t the ultim,
Irsull. Am! Ml. Haiv.nud's t-fieelivrne-.s ajoii-; t!u* lis
o! his own \\oik as a i'ome*lian is t"»* v*ell kn»»^n if*
cjuiie an\bo<!\vs ieinfi»jeeu»rnt.

At Haitfoid on«' nii-.ht I liiid <»a I f.nv.ood's \\vt^ :t
he firniTousIy eonsrnted to m\ ;»»ina on f»»i hi, th.uae
in that perfonniiiHT. \\lih the <!iiim-i;t tieatnu-nt

IN PARIS 415

the stump-speech material the act got the calls that it
potentially held. The value of this was only my own
assay of the stuff, because HarwoocTs association with
the enterprise was worth much more than the material
in question.

Frohman saw the piece in Philadelphia and was de-
pressed. The lay reader should understand the interests
at stake. To fail then was to throw an entire company
out of employment in November; to give in a measure
a black eye to the reputation of the star and to leave on
the hands of the management an expensive production,
including scenery and costumes and a fair stock of print-
ing. Despite its feebleness as theatrical text the play
had shown us that D'Orsay was more acceptable in his
proper comedy work than he was as a pseudo-leading
man.

As C. F. and I leaned over the bulkhead of the Chest-
nut Street Theatre I recalled my experiences in rewriting
the Crane plays "For Money" and "The Governor of
Kentucky/' and lesser work on the unsigned scripts that
C. F. himself had called me in to patch or carpenter.
I thought I saw my way to make a three-act comedy of
what we had. I told him so. My family was in Paris.
I was a bit uneasy about them. I said if he would lay
off the company for four weeks that I would jump over
to Paris and back, and I thought we could salvage all
the investment enumerated, with the exception of the
four weeks' time held in the theatres. C. F. was delighted
with the proposal. D'Orsay and I took the same steamer
for the other side, he going ostensibly to see some member
of his family supposed to be ill. I wrote on the boat and
worked rapidly in Paris.

In three weeks after leaving New York, D'Orsay and

4i6 THE PRINT OF MY RHMKNtBRANCK

I again took a satin: steamer t*n' Amrnca, where we
were two in a total of five tnst-cab;" }>;i'.M-n,,ep,. On the
boat I finished the revision. l\\o du\% alter \\e bndrd
we haci script ant! parts typed aud Uv.au uheaisak \\h\i
that delightful actor, IWrest KoblnsMii. added to the
cast and associated with Hai\M»od. I hi* thire-aet ver-
sion of **T!u* Embassy Ball/* a puu-K tatcical attempt,
was successful. We played il tuo veap.

Paris hicks the ocean, but vuth this ruvption it has
as many suburban enticement1* as \r\\ Vak, and the
Parisian is as accustomed to umnin., av. . \ h^in thr city
for a little one or t\\o i!av \^uati««n a-. an\ inrtM»poIitan
that we know. To ehaiu-e the H!«MS. t'-v;?;.^/ lc\ it/fc-.v,
as they say • is with iheirt a t'ir«jr,«-:a art nt ir«-ntal ^.ani-
tation. \\V made a paitv «»t"'a«n».r t\*.c-K* "i !itt*-i-ti Anu-r-
icans, clnidren included, \*. h»» weie at the- pirtiv hamlet
of Montinny-sur- 1 .oiuj*. in th<* midi!!*- «*t Aptil in i<>of»
on one of tJH-se adnpud ninp; » \. I !«<• !c-n;trr <*l the
Motel Vannr Rouj'r IKIS its u-taiiisi!; \\ ill »»i M»mr. \\ashetl
by the slow waters of the KUn i oir.fl tltat mraiidns 1»\,
held alnu»st in lakrlikr u-tanlatinn bv ihr ninnc-, «.t witter-
gati% that, aeeuinulalrs thrm t'»»r tin* nt-ar-bv mill. I Sti%
little terrace, some fifty b\ iitlv trc-l of ^i.ivrlird lr\rl,
with its circular tablrs uf •,hc"ft«ii««n atul \\c-athrtprnof
chairs, sets like a stajjr to tin* low ainf thratiical {ayade
of the toy hotel, \vhrrr bv a fair jump timn thr f.zotuul
one can almost catch the sill of tlir sre'*nd-sinrv uiiu!»i\v.

On Wednesday the trippers had ^m* home aiul our
American colony had thr phuv t«» • MH •.«•!*, f-s. A vnv
obvious bridal couplr came that exrnn:/; liu- \ounj-*; man
with the French whiskers of the priiod, thr biide in the
attractive and now antiquated custumr of iiu* date, both
oblivious to the strangers who were speaking Kn^iish.

IN PARIS 41?

After a little rowboat trip in the twilight the'couple dis-
appeared. We were at caf6 au lait on the terrace on
Thursday morning. The children at the balustrade were
feeding the swans when the small diamond-paned comic-
opera windows of the upper room opened and there
appeared the bridegroom in a suit of lavender pajamas
whose newly laundered and utterly unruffled condition
invited attention.

Doctor Tom Robbins at our table said: "See those
immaculate pajamas on the new groom!"

All looked and some one remarked, "Yes, a new groom
sleeps clean"; an amusing line, but not so tenacious as
alone to fix the Thursday morning of that nineteenth
day of April. The event that did that was the arrival
of the morning paper relating the catastrophe in San
Francisco, then called an earthquake, but by common
consent since referred to as the fire.
, One of our laughing party was Mrs. Chase, who had
been a Miss Mizner, sister of Wilson and Addison Miz-
ner, Californians. Mr. Chase was still in the States, and
the reports of the devastation included territory in which
the family had important financial and sentimental in-
terests. Other Californians were in our party, with par-
ents, brothers, and sisters in the stricken city. The blow
made everything else forgotten; not only those directly
and personally affected but all the Americans knew their
vacation was over and their stations were at the lines of
quickest communication.

It is rather fine to remember the promptness with
which the Americans in Paris acted at that time. The
American Chamber of Commerce assembled the next
morning upon a call from its president printed in the
Paris New York Herald. It was a crowded meeting, at-

4*8 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

tended not on!\ b\ tin* members hut hy many sojouriUTS
ami transients. I here was some little personal infnrnui-
tionf not much; theeahKs were blocked. Men ot promi-
nence ami power addressed the company, and running
true to form after the American manner tin* lirst definite
action by tin* chamber was an appn»priation and a vol-
unteer subscription. Thousands of dollars \vere im-
mediately plcd-ed. The wa\or «*f San I;raneiseo \vas
telegraphed. \\'lu-u, after a peiiud nf two eir three da\ s,
the rather proud but i'airK s«*lJ'-rrIiant reply was received
that, outsiiie sulr-,eripti«»ns wert* not needed, tin.* American
chamiu i met a,' a in ath! the mone\ wa** tli\ ei ted In a loan
fund a\ailibv to such ( !alitnnuai; > as iotnul theuivKes
in Paris with their communication'* cut »u tiuir 'ouices
of StlppU th-.tioved. The-,e \\eli pliih i,ia!l\ students in
tin* art selut«>ls tlii* SoT u»nne, the Bt au\ • \i ts, and the
musical institutions. Bui lio\\ tuu- the 'piiit, how ail-
niiralJe that hi. hK cuhi\ateti (tl'ical capaeit\ to le-
spond ! I Io\\ thrillin* it. denn»nsti;ni«w ! It was, of
course*, a eoiupaiati\cU small leavlt^n, but it was very
like tin* stir that went over all America that sixth day
in April, f<)t*"\ when the resolution uf Confess decided
that \ve were in the war.

CHAPTER XXIII
SOURCES OF INSPIRATION

One of the delightful conditions in the home life in
Paris, at least from the view-point of an American, is
the attitude of the domestic servants to the enterprise.
Paris is divided into arrondissements, or, as we would
call them, wards, each with its own mayor and police
and domestic courts and administration. In somewhat
similar division, each neighborhood has its little four
corners of shops that supply the neighborhood. There
are the cafe, the baker, the grocer, and the butcher. To
these shops each morning the cook, after the breakfast
hour, goes for her purchases of the day. The shopkeepers
very frankly allow her 10 per cent on the clay's order and
pay it to her then in cash. There is no attempt to con-
ceal this and there is no way to get around it. If the
mistress of the house thinks to get the supplies at a lower
price or get them at the same price and to receive the
commission that is paid to the cook she finds herself go-
ing contrary to established custom and badly mistaken.
The cook's commissions run on all supplies bought that
pass through her department and arc in any way affected
by her art. All other supplies, such as wines, candies,
cakes, and candles, bought outside, pay a percentage to
the waitress.

The receipt of this commission of 10 per cent to each
of these functionaries results in the production of a per-
ennial amiability. In America, in a modest family, the

419

420 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

announcement of a projected dinner-party is apt to create
some resentment. It is never the basis of increased hap-
piness, and too frequently repeated is likely to call forth
a demand for an increase in wages or a maid's notice of
intention to quit. Either of these reactions is more apt
to be brought about in Paris by a failure to have parties
or a practice of having even too few of them.

Another feature of this buying by the domestics is its
real economy. The French cutVmuVr who needs a bit of
onion to flavor a soup will buy one spring onion, and the
greengrocer makes no objection to selling it. Or she may
buy one button from a bulb of garlic, or get a sprig of
parsley the size of a teaspoon. These intimate ingredients
in America are bought by the bunch, or ten cents' worth
in the minimum, a small portion of them used and the
remainder permitted to get stale and be thrown out.

Perhaps it was an appreciation of these economies
that induced us to bring with us from I'Yanee, when we
finally came back, our waitress, Ceeile. Perhaps it was
because the children had taken a liking to her matronly
attentions. At any rate, we found ourselves installed
with Ceeile in the middle distance of our domestic field
at East Hampton in our first summer after our return.
The cook was an Irishwoman, between whose tempera-
ment and Cecile's there scorned to be no friction what-
ever. The up-stairs maid was a German girl whom we
had brought down from New Roehelle. She spoke no
French and her English was fragmentary, Ceeile spoke
and understood only French.

The collision between these representatives from the
opposite sides of the distant Rhine occurred in our pan-
try on a busy day when there was a house-party and
some additional guests from the East Hampton colony.

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION

got all the merits of the discussion, but I remem-
idly it ended by Lizzie hitting Cecile on the forc-
Imost between the eyes with a raw egg. Cecile
;ood the raw egg and declined to remove any of
dence until she had showed herself In her con-
; plight to my wife and me.

previous experience with the two girls was suf-
to tell us that this was the culmination, and after
but earnest talk on the back porch Lizzie got her
nd the chauffeur took her to the 2.13 train. When
[earned that Lizzie had gone she came into the
room and demanded to know if madame had per-
l9 allemande to depart "sans que je sois soulag6e"—
ut me being soothed."

end of the hostilities, with no treaty as to repara-
'ore on Cccile's mind and she soon left for France.
;ed her from East Hampton one hundred and one
o New York, and then through the city to the
* Savoie. On the way I interpreted for her at

five shoe-stores, in each of which she indulged
>e to find a pair of shoes for herself with la nuance
mpe de ceux de madame — the shade of the cut of
>f madame. We might ultimately have found
ut that the French steamship line had a way of
; to hold a departing boat for anybody.
^pointed but gaie, Cecile went up the gangplank,
trembled like the drawbridge under the famed
f Marmion, and into an agitated group of sailors
voluble though informal but competing welcome
id spirited and articulate entertainment for the
ird trip. Perhaps that East Hampton egg started
apon discoveries relatively as important as those
ig the one Columbus discussed with Isabella.

422 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

Down at East Hampton for tiu- summer, <»ne of our
first callers in the woods was Mr. John I )rew, who
motored over from his summer Imme iu-ar the dunes
The talk of the San IYanci-.cu earthquake reminded him
of a letter he had recent 1\ ncrKcd born his nephew
Jack Barrymore. Jack had btrn in San lYanciscu the
night of those shocks and that lite, lie mote of his ex-
periences briefly but drama! icalk . t ncle John had the
letter. At the first shock Jav k had ri-u'ii from his bt'd
at the Palace Hotel. Another \Mcnt lurch had thrown
him against a door, which had -i\«-n wav and let him
fall upon the rim of the bathtub, huttin;', hi. -.ide. Jh-
soon found himself in the -.im-f wiih an ill .a-. ,,,j ted col-
lection of apparel. The nevt dav he met the other mem-
bers of the Willie Collier G.mp.uu, with \\Im-h at that
time he was playing. He and the othrr men ,,f thr cum-
pany were taken in ehan.e bs the military and forced
to help clear the streets b\ pilin - I,,i, ;,-..

I was entirely taken up uith the .hamatic -.i«f«. of t|,,.
description; but l.'ucle John, wit,, |ia , aUavs persisted
in a comic view of his avuncular p.. v.rv. i,,n ,, '-mih-d «..»me.
what sardonically as he said: " Y«-,, it t.«,k a c.»uvulsi,m
of Nature to get him into a bathtub and the failed
States Army to make him \v.»rL"

The thought of John IJarmu,,iv «-. a -,upp,1{fin.- metn-
ber of the company of Willie G.JIirr. f|u.n ;uu| j,j.. ,„,„,.,„
stellar position in the public «-..,,.,.„» |, indicative of the
rapid changes always at w.ui. ,,d ,„.,!,;,,,, ,„,„•,. ,.vi,jrnt
m the theatre than <-lsewhere. A!n,,H.. the ,„ , ,-,.,.. of
that year was lYif/.i Scheif in "MH... Modi,!,-/' the ],,,,fc
by Henry Blossom and music bv \ ictur Hr,ia,t. l-'ni/t
Seheff had just married my ,,„,„! ;U1(| },,,l!lt. lrn.m!> Juhn
-, Jr., the author of "A Mountain Kmopa," "The

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION 423

:uekians," "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,"
other books. At the Lyceum Theatre "The Lion
the Mouse" was in its second year. "The Music
;cr," with David Warfield, was playing at the Bijou,
of these plays were written by Charles Klein, who
with Charles Frohman on the Lusitania. Klein
notably a dramatizer of popular themes. His art
largely the newspaper transferred to the stage.
3 Lion and the Mouse" and "The Gamblers" were
a theatrical view of big business, and "The Third
ee" was a presentation of the police methods of the
A young writer claiming attention with his second
"The Chorus Lady," in which Rose Stahl was
aring at the Garriek Theatre, was James Forbes, now
le front rank of his profession and having to his
t "The Famous Mrs. Fair," in many respects the
of all the post-war plays. Henry Miller and Mar-
; Anglin were having a gratifying success in William
;ha.n Moody 's play, "The Great Divide/' at the Prin-
Theat re. 1 1 enry Arthur Jones' " I lypocrites " was at
ludson. Fleanor Robson was at the Liberty Theatre
Sfurse Marjorie" by Israel Zangwill, who had had a
rctful hearing with his "Children of the Ghetto,"
id a year or two earlier. John Drew was playing
ro's sombre, rectangular, but well-made "His House
hrder." Marie Cahill was starring in "Marrying
f" at Daly's, with the tuneful score by Silvio Hem.
Hegan Rice's "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage
ft/1 later to be accepted in London as the typical
rican picture, was at the New York Theatre,
ng the lighter pieces were Hattic Williams' produo
of "The Little Cherub," with Ivan Caryll's music,
in Russell at the Savoy in "Barbara's Millions," and

£«^^^

the theatrical Dentations of that vet "^ WCfe
Until* of Klein and Bios.som anil I van CVvIF ir r
whom artr «o»,. takc-s my mind to one t)f u, Z "' *" °f

'- « I,, I«,i m, ; ; i V s S-V'"P""'.V for Pctor

'»'"'"' Iu"'! fr"m ••'''"*•

A-

k";>

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION 425

genial publicity man and fixture about the place, one
of Peter's patrons and sympathizers, is dead; Frohman
went down with the Lusitania; none of the old force
survives. But the colored boy, Peter Mason, with his
one lung, is still, in 1922, the factotum of the theatre.

Soon after our return from France I had an experi-
ence which was important to me and which may have
significance for people engaged in writing for the theatre.
At least it will have if I can tell it in a way that will con-
vey my own attitude toward the question it contains.
Mr. Belasco had, at the theatre that then bore his name
and is now the Republic, a drama of the California min-
ing days called "The Girl of the Golden West," in which
Miss Blanche Bates was featured. The story of this
play, if I may indicate it by simply touching its struc-
tural features, is of a Western sheriff somewhat older
than a girl with whom he is in love. The girl is his su-
perior in social quality. Her fancy is taken by a more
modern and modish man, a newcomer in the locality,
who turns out to be a criminal. It is the sheriff's duty
to arrest him. The man takes refuge in the house of the
girl. She hides him and when the sheriff comes denies
any knowledge of him. The sheriff is about to leave
when a bit of evidence attracts his attention to the hid-
ing-place; the man is forced to come forth; the sheriff,
out of consideration for the girl and contrary to his duty,
permits him to escape.

This is an excellent play, full of color of the epoch that
it presents. Some of my friends on the press had written
to me that it was manifestly a reproduction of my play
of "In Mizzoura," written some thirteen years before.
The story of "In Mizzoura," again telling by high lights
in its construction, is of a Western sheriff somewhat older

426 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

than a girl with whom lie is in love. The girl is his su-
perior in social quality. Her fancy is taken by a more
modern and modish man, a newcomer in the locality, who
turns out to be a criminal. It is the shenifs duty to
arrest him. The man takes refuge in the house of the
girl. She hides him and when the sheriff comes denies
any knowledge of him. The sheriff is about to leave
when a bit of evidence attracts his attention to the hid-
ing-place; the man is forced to come forth. The sheriff,
out of consideration for the girl and contrary to his duty,
permits him to escape.

These identical situations in that perfect sequence
could easily have been cited and in a reasonable court
made to have in my own ease a proprietary claim. But
there had been a similar experience, somewhat earlier
and with an equal resemblance, which had taught me
consideration. My play of " Ari/.ona" dealt with a. young
army officer who, trying to shield a woman, placed him-
self liable to a charge of theft. He resigned from the
army, went West, became a cowboy, later met his old
enemy of the earlier days, and in a quarrel with him the
enemy was shot. That the hero had not killed him was
proved by the fatal bullet being of another caliber than
that of the hero's gun, and he was acquitted. Mr. Edwin
Milton Royle some time later wrote a play with those
relationships and that sequence of events which he called
"The Squaw Man/* One agent and one manager told
me that upon the reading of it. they had declined to con-
sider it, feeling that it too closely resembled "Ari/.ona."
Now I happened to have seen Mr. Royle's play when,
so to speak, it was in the cradle. lit* produced, at the
Lambs Club a little piece in which an Englishman living
with a squaw wife in the West was called upon by a so-

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION 427

licitor from London who came for the purpose of telling
him that he had inherited a title, and, although he cared
nothing for it himself, it properly belonged to his little
half-breed son, whose mother was the squaw wife. The
squaw wife, overhearing and understanding enough of
this to know that she was standing in the way of both
the husband and the little half-breed boy for whom title
and fortune were waiting in England, killed herself. It
was a tragic one-act play, and Mr. Royle was advised
by everybody to elaborate it into a four-act drama. He
was obliged thereupon to think of his hero leaving Eng-
land for sufficient reason, which, nevertheless, should be
nothing against his character; and by the dramatist's
formula he had him leaving for the sake of a woman,
and had him leaving under a cloud. The simplest cloud
for an army officer to quit under was a charge of mis-
appropriation of funds, and in the Wild West relations
that followed for the purpose of the play he had the fight
and the exculpation of the hero by the swift and simple
evidence of a bullet not fitting his gun.

I had used that device some years before in " Arizona."
But I didn't invent it. It was a bit of material evidence
in more than one Western inquest, and the fact of fitting
the bullet to the gun of a man accused of killing was one
of the first steps in legal identification familiar to every
reporter. And Mr. Royle was forced into the construc-
tion of his drama by most natural and logical sequences.

When Mr. Belasco wanted to write Blanche Bates
into a mining-camp a sheriff was the most likely lover;
and the most logical rival, in order to establish conflict,
would be a man who was rival not only in the affections
of the girl but an opponent in the line of the sheriff's
duty; that would make him a criminal. And if the sheriff

428 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

once got after that criminal any dramatist, in ore
hold his people of interest together, would probably
of the criminal taking refuge in the home of the gi:
somebody had come along and pointed out the I
blance of these situations to those in "In Mizzotxi
would, nevertheless, have been Mr. Belasco's d\j
go ahead with his play in its new color and in the c
of its epoch and write his story. I thought he had
this in such fine fashion that I regarded his plsuy
valuable exhibit of how the mind of a trained dra,i
works when once given a strong and stimulating si
tion to start back from and build a sequence of &
I speak of these two examples because the thea
filled with their like. So are the other arts. The:
five notable pictures of the "Last Supper" by pa
of the Renaissance, each valuable principally bee a
shows the temperament of the artist working WJT
material.

The courts are sometimes burdened with questi*
this kind, and it takes a wise judge to see where t:
dividual right ceases and the common right in a,i
begins. I remember reading that some Chicago
had decided upon apparently sufficient evidence
Francis Bacon had written the plays of William 5
speare. A Chicago judge decided that a citizen o
place had given Edmond Rostand the idea for t
mantic poetical play, "Cyrano de Bergerac," appa
oblivious of the fact that Savinien Cyrano de Bex
born in 1620 at the chateau of that name in Pei
was a French writer and duellist, had the persoaa
syncrasies that were the identifying marks of org;
in the work of the Chicago author; had himself ^
plays and poems and had already suggested by I

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION 429

and writings "Micromegas," a philosophic romance by
Voltaire, and "Gulliver's Travels" by Dean Swift.

A year or two later than the time of which I am writing
I was called as an expert witness in a suit at Washington,
where a newspaper man somewhat new to the theatre
was suing a dramatist who had never seen the newspaper
man's libretto, charging that the second libretto was
taken from it. One resemblance was that both books
had two elderly couples and two juvenile couples in love.
The judge thought this not so important when it was
pointed out to him that a majority of operas, especially
comic operas, were made up of double quartets. It was
a musical rather than a literary requirement.

At a risk of being tiresome on the subject, let me
relate an instance of this year 1922. A few weeks ago
at the request of their author I wrote an introduction
to four little plays by Mr. Percy Knight that are to be
printed in a single volume. One of those plays has for
its subject the burial of the unknown soldier in London,
and deals in poetic fashion with the meeting of a girl
and an English veteran who come to the palings of the
graveyard, both believing that they knew the man.
The girl has brought some flowers for a dead sweetheart;
the soldier is morally certain that the unknown was his
pal.

This little scene had been played in one of the Lambs'
gambols. At a more recent gambol Mr. Emmett Corrigan
had a sketch which I did not see, but which was reported
in committee as being a dialogue between a man and
wife in America who have lost a son. The topic is the
burial of the unknown soldier at Washington. For some
reason the father feels that the unknown boy is theirs,
and upon the breast of the mother whom he has en-

430 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

deavored to console ho pins a star. A very experienced
and indignant dramatist was proposing that Mr, Corrigan
should he disciplined for tins appropriation of an idea.
When asked to give an opinion upon the propriety of
such a procedure my answer was that the unknown sol-
dier's official burial in France and in England and in
America was for the very purpose of honoring all un-
identified and giving to everybody who had a loved one
among the missing tin* faint, comfort that might lie in
the slight belief that the unknown was his or her missing
boy. Poems had been written about it, and thousands
of editorials and thousands of patriotic and memorial
speeches had been made on the theme. The wonder
was not that an English playwright am! another Ameri-
can playwright, should have chosen the subject but that
hundreds had not done so.

'I here are so many starting-points for writing plays
that if one were to name all of them if would be a. real
draft on attention, A good play is a completed thing,
with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and should make
some disposition of the considerations it raises and pre-
sents. Along this trajectory, this line of travel which
would IK* rather improperly but most effectively dia-
gramed by a circle, one can take almost any of its throe
hundred and sixty degrees as a starting-point.

I have \vrittcn:;in these chapters of beginning a play
with only the actor, Mr. Nat Gooduin, in mind; getting
a character that would lit him, a set of circumstances in
which the character would be put, and a series of situa-
tions through which ho would pass in that environment.
1 have suggested somewhat of the same process in speak-
ing of "Puwtuekot" for D'Orsay. Earlier I \\rote of
"The Burglar/' made from Mrs. Burnett's story, in

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION 43i

which the burglar is confronted by the ingenuousness
of a child. By making that child his own daughter the
meeting itself became a situation, which is another way
of starting a play.

Sometimes one takes a theme, a question acceptable
in the public mind, and by making it articulate, and
selecting characters expressive of it and affected by it,
uses the theme as his starting-point. Often the dram-
atist takes a story ready-made but in narrative form,
as was "The Soldiers of Fortune," by Richard Harding
Davis, eliminates the descriptions, arranges its dramatic
situations in proper sequence and crescendo, supplies
what other situations are needed, puts the whole expres-
sion into dialogue, and thereby achieves his play.

There have been many pictures that have inspired
plays. In one of the Paris salons of the early jo's there
was a canvas showing a wrecked boudoir in a chateau
in which a band of vandal German officers were carous-
ing. Paul Potter took that as the inspiration for one of
his acts in "The Conquerors." When Maurice Barry-
more dramatized somebody's novel of "Roaring Dick"
he made a stage setting and a situation from another
salon picture called "The Wolf in the Sheep fold," which
showed a bland and unsuspecting husband introducing
to his wife a lady-killing officer in uniform. The group
was on a portico shaded by a large Japanese umbrella.

I have an impression that some of Hogarth's " Rake's
Progress" got into plays. But I don't recall any com-
plete series of pictures used as the skeleton for a full
evening's play with the exception of Charles Dana Gib-
son's "Education of Mr. Pipp." That was a set of two-
page cartoons satirizing the little accidental, limited, un-
assertive American nouveau millionaire and his large,

432 THE PRINT OF MY EK\f KM BRANCH

aggressive, dominant, and overriding wife and the oil-
spring of this counterbalancing mixture, two lovely
daughters. The daughters were the first of the famous
Gibson girls of the middle <>o'st with the crowning puifed-
and-pompadourcd hair, Ion*.; necks, the .stately hearing,
and the royally draped, costumes. When Gibson had
made one or two of these pictures their reception created
a demand, and he was obliged to show his family of Pipps
in various situations and with occasional new acquaint-
ances. When he had exhausted the round of fashionable
entertainments in America and the stories had still to go
on he carried the Pipp family to Midland, where their
money got them into the fringe of the nobilitv, and later
took them to Paris, where they vu*re most unmercifully
fleeced and imposed upon.

Without setting up to be the supreme court on mat-
ters artistic in America, I will venture the opinion that
Charles Dana Gibson is our must gifted and accomplished
illustrator. There is a generation of young men that
have followed and learned from him. and many of these*
have each an individual touch quite as agreeable in its
way as the technic of Gibson. Some of them have his
vigor of line and precision of execution; some have his
understanding of character and his capacity to interpret
it. But I know of none who has all these qualities.* nor
in Gibson's degree. Nor do 1 think of one that lias his
wide and deep understanding of the human family.

In the old New Hoehelle days then- used to hang over
Fred Remington's buffet, in the dining-room of his home
on Webster Avenue an original drawing of Gibson's on
a eard eighteen by twenty-four inches. This had served
as the original for a reduction in an early number of Life.
In it two men stand at a sideboard. The host is a white-

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION 433

haired, white-mustached, amiable, high-bred, cultured,
ssthetical-appearing person, slightly less than at his best
at his apparent age of sixty because of his concession to
a convivial temperament. He is well nourished but not
averfed, twinkling, tolerant, human. He still holds a
decanter from which he has just filled his own glass, and
ts directing his attention to his guest, who holds a glass
Df port. The guest is a Protestant bishop in the black
:Ioth and neckerchief of his kind, rotund, sleek, artificial,
uncertain, dissembling, sanctimonious, gluttonous, ap-
prehensive. One man is so manifestly the host radiating
sheer and the other the occasional guest surreptitiously
accepting a prohibited but habitual ration that it is a
delight to look at the drawing and see these character-
istics which the master draftsman has understood, de-
duced, set down, and communicated with the magic of
a few strokes of the pen.

To Remington himself, endeavoring character por-
trayal with no such subtlety, and to a man writing for
the theatre who would have needed a scene of fifteen
minutes, to communicate all that Gibson put into his
single sketch, the drawing was a never-diminishing de-
light. In Gibson's character sketches of the Pipp family,
and the friends and satellites that they attracted, there
tvere exponents of every fine and nearly every despicable
emotion; not only the broader Hogarthian elemental
passions but the very shades and nuances into which
my psychological spectrum could dissolve them.

It seemed to me that to translate these visible expres-
sions into words, not the descriptive and narrative array
Jiat would make a novel but the etched and vital kind
:hat would put them into a play, would be agreeable
employment. Nothing that I remember writing was

4M "Uil, PU!\F OF MY Kl Ml MWUM.h

f f "It ! » <!* *. I 1 t * '

iaitt ful ;u 4 un»:v l '., ,
ihr ulhrl * " LI a- *« i . ^!f i t

ihr nun ;i: ! .\ » ,u» \ l!i4l ^

M a. S.i* I r r»' t

.i* 1* - t i * . (| ,„?,

M tk h

Ml, >tii\

i;, that

ir.i in iLf I,1 i / «
t» r f rfi i! - i .^, .,
li r a, « • i - , Vt «

i j «*.t » *i^j^ a
Mi I •,,•*'< J*"" » n,

\\ *hiai;i t * r !< ra , -

1 !ir ir ! f! f!;r i .*-.t,

|iiiiii;ifu hi tti 1*4 t* ^
Mi. Nal ItM^ij^r

l!;ill{ ttlfr \LiiU.r } '»

at I'M! I,: r

* J4 I ! a L • * r
l a r;4M- *4 »

\Jutli «hu'!r«l u. i, .ill- , i!*., - , 4 .• » h«. i ihr Lall-

MH Rc t N OF INSPIRATION

435

i: / f ' , I * ! ; t i- hi.,]), to the next story,
" 1 * !'.*a.ir undei this descending
.1 ' a H ,»! : ' i ;i >tu«rt. This, adopted for

* -r -J- '• . •' ^*' - '" k| t the t»nlv one of its kind
^ r; •!» i«, ,:..-.

t» :• * • i r.«'i<- t > it 11 .i Uttlr comicality of Nat's.
r a!" r ^ t!(c" i^'!";. I wan admiring a pretty
if . . I'T '»..i!1, .i i in\,i. Mime fifteen by eighteen
.l«" ?l • /*^f'«.t\ i*t ilu- ihird Mrs, (Joodwin,

* »••• »•?•• '• » «1^ j'H»;uits of the second Mrs.

i-\ *?« * i i i • .tdn 11 : 'ii Nat said with the little
1 . * i * '< *»it:M-L .t amed wlien he wanted

» t

.Huc : "\e*'t that p-p-pieturc
ii 0"llii%.0
.'-!, hut not \\orth all that.

lr- ih thiit \-fi\e hundred clol-
1 l»ou;»Jit it and fifteen

t!r

:u \

H
I\%

!*:*»}»> Hfll, uiih Iiis excellent sup-
HI- jil;i\r«i the piece that season
t!a- !IA*» \<\'ti% that followed.
i wiiltrn in fair!) close succession
'.nl nl I*a\\tuckct/ <4Thc Eduea-
Lr (»!,rr diil/' "Mrs. Leflingweirs
'. IUI/' and f'I)e Lancey." i felt
s 'i wrthin}', mote serious. Among
mil ..n t plas, i4A (Constitutional
m Mr. Palmer. Shortly after
» '«>.* oi VH my nei};hbor at New
:u% IUMIUIS Nelson, showed me a
.iin iriu in;', to \\rite a short story
Maik i^aiu hud found "that a

436 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

short story was a novel in the cradle, which, if taken out
and occasionally fondled, would grow into a full-sized
book." Partly on that hint, my one-act play was occa-
sionally taken from its cradle and caressed. Mr. Palmer
had refused the play because there is a maxim in the
theatre that no material is useful there until it has served
as subject-matter for all other literary forms and been
made familiar to the public through poetry, fiction, lec-
tures, and reportorial and editorial comment.

XXIV

"THE WITCHING HOUR" AND OTHERS

During the years since 1890 there had been an increas-
ing public interest in telepathy, and the public's informa-
tion had grown. In my own mind my playlet had also
grown and was now a four-act play. Before wasting
time on its actual writing, however, I accepted a chance
to have the one-act piece played to a private audience
of some two hundred men in the Lambs Club; and as
the little play contained what was most diaphanous and
attenuated in the whole story, if such an audience, en-
tirely lacking the feminine element, would accept the
fable, the remainder of the venture would be up to the
skill of the dramatist. In the club, with the late Edward
Abeles playing the woman's part and Forrest Robinson
playing the part of the old judge, the little piece made
a decided impression.

I have said earlier, I think when talking of Mr. Paul
Potter, that plays are constructed backward. Paul
Potter was the first person to bring that to my attention.
The playwright doesn't take his pen in hand and begin
placidly to write dialogue which develops without his
intention into something dramatic. He starts with a
dramatic situation which has a possibility in the theatre
of some strong effect and tries to find for that the imme-
diate cause, and for that cause one still further back in
origin, and it is in that fashion that his construction
grows. Very often this effect, which is the starting-point

437

438 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

in the development of a story, can be expressed in one
act, and it is not uncommon for a playwright to try out
his idea in tabloid shape. If it has sufficient fibre and
power to make a big scene of the play he may then de-
velop it. Denman Thompson's "Old Homestead'* be-
gan in that shape. "Muldoon's Picnic" was once a one-
act vaudeville skit. Mr. Royle's "The Squaw Man,"
as told earlier, was done at the Lambs as a sketch. So
was John Willard's "The Cat and the Canary/5 one of
the reigning successes of 1922. My own plays, "The
Burglar/' "Alabama/' "The Harvest Moon," "As a
Man Thinks," "Rio Grande," and "The Copperhead"
were each at first one act.

The one-act play, "A Constitutional Point," had grown
out of my experiences with Bishop, the thought-reader,
of whom I have written in an earlier chapter. Bishop
was so constituted that by throwing himself into a re-
ceptive condition, which he called autohypnotic, he was
impressed by thoughts of other people. He didn't see
these thoughts as words, but as pictures, unless the
thought was about a word in a book, when his percept
would, of course, be that particular typed word and the
surrounding print on its page. This power had come
to be called telepathy. Oliver Wendell Holmes had writ-
ten concerning it in his "Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table," except that he called it cerebricity. Somewhat
later Mark Twain, writing of his personal experiences
in association with its phenomena, had referred to it as
mental telegraphy. Doctor Thomas Hudson, in 1893,
published his "The Law of Psychic Phenomena," the
first of a series of five books on telepathy and related
subjects. In one of these, in making an argument for
immortality, he raises the question whether telepathy

"THE WITCHING HOUR- 439

ht not be a means of communication between a dis-
>odicd entity, or spirit, as commonly called, and a
jon still living. I think it was this hint that brought
ny mind "A Newport Legend," the poem by Bret
te, about an old house at Newport, haunted. A
ng girl in the colonial days died of a broken heart
his house. It seems that her sweetheart sailed away
left her. Bret Harte tells of her coming back:

"And ever since then when the clock strikes two,

She walks unbidden from room to room,
And the air is filled, that she passes through,
With a subtle, sad perfume.

The delicate odor of mignonette,

The ghost of a dead-and-gone bouquet,

Is all that tells of her story; yet
Could she think of a sweeter way?"

'he poet's way of suggesting the idea is so much more
jptablc than a scientific one that I used those two
;cs, which an old judge reads to another, as my way
ntroduce the subject, and just after the reading had
say :

Beautiful to have a perfume suggest her. I suppose
ppeals to me especially because I used to know a girl
» was foolishly fond of mignonette."
o that when the daughter of the judge's old sweet-
rt comes to talk about her mother and brings a for-
:en letter of the judge's from among the time-stained
crs that the mother left it seems to him somewhat
•e than coincidence; and when the daughter has gone,
;r a pathetic appeal for her son, who is under sentence
leath, and the old judge, alone, gets from the old let-
the remembered odor of mignonette, the Bret Harte

440 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRANCE

lines come back to him, and he fancies there has been
an influence upon him from the other side of the grave.
This little act I decided to make the second and not
the third act of a four-act play, because, moving as it
had been to the audience when it was tried in its detached
presentation, I felt there should be something more posi-
tively dramatic as a climax for a play. Casting about
for that, I encountered the subject of hypnotism. Telep-
athy and hypnotism are not especially related, except
that telepathic communication is clearer under hypnosis.
While Hudson and others had been writing of telepathy
and of the therapeutic value of suggestion to hypnotized
patients, a religious and ethical opposition to the prac-
tice had found expression in some notable protests. One
of these, written in a tone of warning and with a claim
to esoteric knowledge, called an act of hypnotism a great
psychological crime. It implied that the hypnotist, once
in control of the thought of his subject, was never freed
of that connecting bond and that both individuals passed
into eternity held together by it. This was a little deep
and somewhat terrorizing for my use in the play, but I
thought I'd be on safe ground in suggesting that the force
was not a very good one for the layman to play with.
In thinking also of telepathic influence, the control of
the thought as well as the will of another presented an
equal responsibility. I therefore made these two ethical
considerations the theme and overtone of what I was
projecting. The result of that, not to bore a lay reader
with technical considerations of a playwright, was to
give me a rather fine old character in sympathy with
my contentions and a vigorous and indifferent one op-
posed to him and to convince whom would be the busi-
ness of the play. I therefore had theme, definite direc-

"THE WITCHING HOUR" 441

tion and some situations. Despite the fact that I had
been thinking and reading and having experiences in
these subjects for something like eighteen years since
my trip with Bishop, I spent another year getting help-
ful information from professional hypnotists and clair-
voyants. I speak of the time thus spent on this play in
contrast to some of the hasty efforts like "Mrs. Leffing-
welFs Boots." -Perhaps there is a commensurate differ-
ence in the calibers.

When the play was done I read it to Charles Frohman.
Nobody could have less scientific information on the
subjects than he had, and his reception of it would be a
fair indication of what an average audience might do.
The reading was under rather test conditions too. The
night was oppressively warm. C. F. was in his apart-
ment, then on the top floor of Sherry's old building,
Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, now remodelled
into business offices. He had on a cotton shirt and a pair
of trousers. He sat cross-legged in a big leather chair.
As I finished each act his only comment was, "Go on."
At the conclusion of the play there was a wait that filled
me with apprehension.

At length he said: ."That's almost too beautiful to
bear."

The language was so unlike C. F. — in fact, the idea was
so unlike him — that I thought for a moment there was
mockery about it. But he was in earnest.

He added: "When shall we do it?"

We discussed and decided upon the men and women
we would like for the company, and I left in an elated
mood. I saw him again the next day to talk production.
His enthusiasm for the play had not subsided. A week
later he sent for me. We met in his office in the Empire

author of the play was evidently crazy. It was as im-
possible for me to argue the point with C. F. as it would
have been for one to lift himself by his boot-straps. A
crazy man can't act as both his own alienist and attorney
without being an unattractive client. I met Daniel Froh-
man a day later. In the friendliest way he answered:

"Yes, I did say that. But I meant, of course, only
in the treatment of that subject. Forget it, Gus; go out
West and give us one of your wholesome 'Arizonas.'"

I never blamed Daniel Frohman for this opinion or
thought less of his general judgment. Except to one
who has made a study of the subjects of telepathy or
hypnotism, all that can be said about them sounds in-
vented and unreal. That Charles Frohman accepted
them I think grew out of hearing the play, and his judg-
ment would have been the same as Daniel's if he had
only read the text and not seen it partly dramatized,
as every author unconsciously does dramatize his own
work when reading it.

Frohman was a most delightful manager to talk terms
to. His method was simply to ask, "What do you
want?'5 In my own experience I never heard him say,
"We can't give it." It was after many years that I sug-
gested terms which included an interest in the profits,
and as he conceded these he smilingly added, "I have
been wondering why you didn't ask for a share a long
time ago." Somebody had told him something of space
rates and the money that prominent authors had got
per word for their product from publishers. With his

"THE WITCHING HOUR" 443

keen, sense of values, he was, of course, amused by the
story that at one time Tennyson had received a pound
a word on his poems. This may or may not be a fact,
but Frohman took it seriously.

"And what do you think/' he asked, "was the first
poem he wrote after he touched the five-dollar rate?
Think of it, five dollars a word ! Well, here it is:

"'What does little birdie say,
Singing, singing all the day?
Singing, singing all the day,
What does little birdie say?*"

Charley thought it was pretty shrewd of the laureate
to go down the line with these little words one way; but
to make a round trip, collecting five dollars every jump,
was just too hilarious. This may not be an accurate
quotation of the verse, but it was the C. F. version.

My experience with Charles Frohman as an auditor
made me believe that Mr. Lee Shubert, who perhaps
had no more book knowledge of the subject or actual
experience with it than C- F., might find in it a layman's
equal interest. This proved to be the case. Before I
read him the play I was careful to tell him its history —
Mr. Palmer's uneasiness about the subject, Mr. Froh-
man's enthusiasm for it, and then the change of mind.
To tell all about a play when one takes it to a manager
is a good practice. It may be a little hard on a rejected
manuscript at first, but when the managers come to
understand that you are withholding nothing from them
your statements acquire a value that outweighs the slight
disadvantage in the history of any manuscript. If I
were presuming to advise younger dramatists about the
conduct of their business I think this is one of the points

tiictt IAC jULij.gj.jLi/ J.J.CLVC

had it. Any attempt at secrecy gains for the author only
the unenviable record of disingenuousness. Mr. Shubert
had the same sympathetic reception for the play that
C. F. had had, and acting upon his decision immediately
turned over its production to me. I don't think he heard
any of it again until it was up to its dress rehearsals.

In discussing the cast, Charles Frohman and I had
agreed upon John Mason as the central character for
"The Witching Hour/* and it was not difficult to per-
suade Mr. Shubert to this when the play was carried to
him. Mason at that time was under contract with Mr.
Harrison Grey Fiske, who generously released him to us.
To those who knew John Mason's work nothing need
be said in description of his art. To those who know only
his reputation and have never seen him play, one may
say that he was one of the best actors that America ever
produced. To begin with, he was a man of great intel-
ligence, and in the field of mathematics he had a talent
that amounted to genius. I never saw any work to justify
that statement, but several men have told me of his
ability mentally to calculate sums and fractions and
other problems in arithmetic that the ordinary man could
do only laboriously with pencil.

As an actor his power lay in his great self-possession
and a wonderful sense of time, which showed in his read-
ing. He had the ability to put into a pause all the mean-
ing that was carried in its context and somewhat more.
His voice was deep and resonant, modulated and trained.
He had that other great-actor quality of being able to
listen on the stage and give his attention to another

"THE WITCHING HOUR" 445

speaker; and In his dramatic work — I speak of that in
contradistinction to his performances in opera, for which
he was well known — he never showed a consciousness of
his audience. Add to these qualities a fine sense of value
of gesture, a wise restraint and very sparing use of which
made every motion significant, then a physical relaxa-
tion that robbed everything he did of any seeming pose,
although to a person trained in the theatre it was evi-
dent he knew the value of every position, and you have
some considerations on which to base an understanding
of his equipment as actor, and perhaps of some of his
effects. The part of Jack Brookfield in the play was that
of a gambler whose education was above the stratum
into which his business threw him socially. Mason's
speech and carriage secured that impression. To seem
less than socially superior would have been an assump-
tion. The gambler was supposed to be a dominant figure
in personal affairs, will-power. Mason conveyed that
idea also.

I don't remember any consultation with Mr. Shubert
about any players. They must have been sent to him
on the question of their salaries, but otherwise the wishes
of the author were unopposed. I think it was John Mason
who suggested the engagement of Russ Whytal for the
old justice in the play. I have an idea that Whytal is
not so well known throughout the country as some other
men of less ability and less real prominence. Mr. Whytal
is himself a dramatic author. Some years ago his play,
"For Fair Virginia," was a reigning success. I can't
think of a man on either side of the Atlantic who would
have filled more completely the part of Justice Prentiss
than Mr. Whytal did with his fine, sympathetic under-
standing of what the character stood for.

For the heavy man, a district attorney, we were able

about as sure a knowledge of effect as any man on the
stage.

William Sampson, who played the comedy part, an
almost dissolute and altogether unmoral old professional
gambler, gray-haired and white-mustached, comes very
near being our best American character comedian. He
Is as much like the late James Lewis, of Daly's, in method
as one man can be like another. With him, Whytal, and
Nash supporting Mason, we had a quartet that would
have carried any reasonable material to success.

I have written before once or twice in these pages of
coincidences occurring during their writing. These have
not been remarkable, but they have been arresting, and
their accent has perhaps for a moment interrupted the
monotony of our march.

This above paragraph about William Sampson I dic-
tated at the end of a session in the afternoon of April 5,
1922, and then, as I try to do after a day's work, went
for a walk. On the wall just inside the door of the Lambs
Club, in the usual place for such communications, was
pinned a usual subscription paper, with some fifty or
sixty signatures to it under the caption, "Flowers for
William Sampson.55 It was a shock to learn that he had
passed away suddenly the night before. I can add to
the paragraph only the record of my deep affection for
him and my esteem as man and artist.

In our first cast of "The Witching .Hour " we were
assisted also by the sterling actress, Jennie Eustace, and
a very magnetic young woman no longer in the theatre,

"THE WITCHING HOUR" 447

named Adelaide Nowak. I think it rather incumbent
upon me,^ after having so frankly recorded Daniel Froh-
man's opinion, to say that the play was the biggest dra-
matic success of that year. It went through the season
in New York, while a second company was playing it
in Chicago, and John Mason continued to play in it until
nearly three years later, when he went into another play
in which I had written him an equally prominent but
altogether different character.

I have said earlier in these chapters that I hope at
some other time to write an article on psychic phenomena
as I have found them. In my wish to be thoroughly in-
formed concerning the background against which in "The
Witching Hour" I was outlining comparatively so little
I got a fund of information that would have served for
fifty plays. It is not strange then that the two next plays
after "The Witching Hour" should have been on some-
what related subjects. The older readers will remember
that in the earlier stages of the cult of Christian Science
there was a considerable public interest in the subject
of mental science, so called, and therapeutical and meta-
physical values of suggestion.

My next play, "The Harvest Moon," was upon this
theme. There is not enough novelty in the story or in-
cident in the history of the play to make it worth a
reader's attention. One item, however, has, I think,
significance. That was the performance of Mr. George
Nash, of whom I have already written as an excellent
actor. There are a few men who take acting as an art,
and when we find one of these we usually find a char-
acter actor. I have written of Lionel Barrymore's quali-
ties in this department, his willingness to put in study
on the type he is to portray. George Nash, somewhat

YYC11 1, UVC1 L<J JTcULlb, WJLU1 YVlllUil 11C Weld ctll CctU.^ JLcUlllllcU,

to get an intimate contact with the type; to study de-
portment, carriage, gesture, expression, and accent. He
came back with all that and a complete wardrobe for the
play made by a French tailor; his shirts and collars,
linen and neckties and footwear were authentic. One
might think that this attention would hardly be repaid;
that only the most external showing would affect an audi-
ence; and it may be the case. But there was another
effect upon the man himself which bred an authority
that mere assumption could not have secured. The play
was only moderately successful, but that element of the
public that approved it remained very loyal to Mr. Nash;
and although twelve years have gone by, I get an occa-
sional letter inquiring about him and the possible repro-
duction of the play. It is the enthusiasm of such men as
this in the theatre that keeps alive the interest of men
writing for it.

About this time there came over the taste of the public
one of those changes imperceptible in its progress but
definite in its results, concerning the form of the musical
play. People began to lose interest to some extent in
the formal, well-made comic opera and turned to what
came to be known as the musical comedy. With this
in mind, a manager came to me to help him get a story
suitable to the personality and talents of De Wolf Hopper.
He had a facile and rapid-working musician with most
melodic faculty, Mr. Silvio Hein, who stood ready to
furnish the music, and also one or two young men who
wanted to write verses for such a piece. All that he

"THE WITCHING HOUR" 449

needed was a comic story with some vivacity, and a cen-
tral character that would carry Mr. Hopper; or, to put
it more complimcntarily and more truthfully to that
artist, a character which Mr. Hopper could properly
animate.

If the call had not been a hurry one I probably should
have started to build something from the ground up;
but with the feeling of haste in the enterprise my mind
by association drifted to other occasions of theatrical
need. I remembered the times we had put up "His Last
Legs" as an emergency bill One important fact in its
favor as the groundwork for a musical play was that it
was short; it required no trimming; it was almost in
shape ready for added lyrics and music. It needed a
little change that would allow for the introduction of a
female chorus, but this was easily fixed by making its
scenes those of a female seminary instead of a private
house. To emphasize Mr. Hopper's importance to the
eye we gave him a little horse-racing kind of a valet of
devoted attachment. This wasn't particularly new.
Mr. Hopper had in two or three of his earlier successes
been so seconded by Alfred Klein, a talented brother
of the dramatist, Charles Klein. I gave the manager a
synopsis of the story; his verse- writer and his musician
went to work; chorus was assembled for rehearsal; I
took the book of "His Last Legs," and dictating from it
made a free transcription with such changes as would
accommodate the differences I have described. The com-
pany was ready to play in four weeks, which is somewhat
less than the time usually taken by musical rehearsals
for a book that has already been completed.

Feeling that the public would be slow to accept a
musical play from me, the manager announced the au-

cares. jDernara was tne nngiisn autnor 01 nis
Legs/5 Mr. Hem's name went on the programme prop-
erly as the composer. The play, called "The Matinee
Idol/5 was, as I have implied in earlier chapters, an im-
mediate success. Critics were a little at sea over the
English and French collaborateurs on the book, but they
were agreed upon its value to Mr. Hopper and were glad
to see him once more on Broadway with something suited
to his talents.

When John Mason had about finished playing "The
Witching Hour,55 I was trying to get for him a story of
equal seriousness and value, and a character necessarily
mature, that he could play, and follow his performance
of Jack Brookfield. The doctor in "As a Man Thinks55
was to my mind such a part, and his relationship to his
patient in the last act I regarded as a key-note for his
character, although the least dramatic of the things he
might do. I therefore tried it out, as I have said one
sometimes does, in a little one-act play. We gave this
at the Lambs. Mr. Eugene Presbrey played the sick
man, and I played the doctor myself. I felt that we had
a character that would stand development and that would
be acceptable. I knew a Jewish doctor who was giving
a great deal of his time to the care of crippled children,
and doing it with an unselfishness and a lack of adver-
tising that made it admirable. I thought it would be
acceptable to the public to see a Jew put in that position
' prominently instead of having him ridiculed as he gen-
erally was in the theatre. I share none of the hostility
that many do to the dominant management in the Ameri-

'THE WITCHING HOUR"

451

can theatre because it is Jewish. I felt then, and have
said more than once in public since, that the Jews were
in control of the American theatre because they deserved
to be. The theatre as a business is one that does not
lend itself readily to union hours for the persons in con-
trol. Its problems are constant from the moment one
comes on duty to the time that the curtain drops and
often later. There is something in the Anglo-Saxon tem-
perament disposed to neglect these duties. The Jew
will stick as close to the work as the work requires, just
as he sticks to his work in the sweatshop, at the sewing-
machine, or long hours in the second-hand clothing busi-
ness. Starting out to do something, he persists. For
that reason among others the theatre falls readily into
his control.

Having made my doctor a Hebrew, I began to think
in terms of Hebrew philosophy. I moved naturally to
the double standard of morality discussed in the play;
the fact that in modern society for a breach of the con-
jugal contract woman is more severely punished than is
man. While with us the punishment is in the pillory
of public opinion, in the old Jewish law the woman was
stoned to death. The play tries to show that such
punishment must persist so long as the family is the unit
of our social structure. A woman knows or may know
the father of her children. A father can be sure of his
paternal relationship only in the degree of his faith in
his wife. We can maintain a social structure, no matter
how unworthy husbands and fathers may be; but as
soon as mothers fail chaos has arrived. If womanhood
becomes corrupt the only life-preserver that can keep
even the heads of humanity above the waters is a paternal
state, a strong socialistic government, in which the in-

this dictated paragraph made a second theme in the
play. These two ideas, one associated with mental science
and the other associated with the Jewish idea of woman's
greater responsibility, led to the construction of the story
which is now in the book "As a Man Thinks/5

In this play Mason made an impression as profound
as the one he had made in "The Witching Hour/' and
in a character almost diametrically opposed. This is
not my own partial estimate alone. There was hardly a
principal city in the United States in which some Jewish
rabbi did not speak upon his performance in the part.
Few authors are so fortunate in their supporting casts
as I was in this company that was associated with Mr.
Mason in that play. Walter Hale and Vincent Serrano,
about both of whom I have written fairly intimately in
earlier chapters, had parts that suited them. William
Sampson, referred to only a few paragraphs above, played
the comedy old man with fine discretion and excellent
effect; and that convincing player of American business
men, Mr. John Flood, had such a role.

Some writer for the papers spoke of the flowerlike
Chrystal Herne. I have no quarrel with that descrip-
tion of the lady, but what impressed me about her work
as Mrs. Clayton was the expression of mental alertness,
the constantly emotional and thinking personality. The
play was printed as a book. When an author inscribes
a book it isn't always easy to find the most proper phrase,
but in the copy that was given to this actress I had no
difficulty in writing, "To Chrystal Herne, who was Mrs.

"THE WITCHING HOUR" 453

Clayton/' If in writing the part I had a conception that
differed from her performance it was not sufficiently
definite to hold its place against her lifelike and convinc-
ing assumption of the role. In the more mature part it
would be impossible to get a better actress than Amelia
Gardner. So, as I have said, taking the cast altogether,
it was such another organization as I had had only three
or four times in some thirty years. The other casts asso-
ciated in my mind were the ones that played "Alabama"
and "Arizona"; "Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots" and "The
Other Girl"

XXV
INFLUENCES: BOOKS AND MEN

This report carries me to March 13, 1911. I am
tempted to write of subsequent events, but will wait.
Early in these chapters I referred to the remarks of the
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, as he decided to offer
the brown seed capsules, as he called them, the early
simple memories from which sprouted such "flowers as
his garden grew/* In rather haphazard manner I have
tumbled my planting and some of its resultant vegeta-
tion into the notice of patient and hopeful readers, and
now as I near the end of the hearing I fancy them saying,
"Well?" and "What of it?" In one of Wilde's plays he
has a speaker respond to the cue — experience. "Ex-
perience is the name Tuppy gives to his mistakes." As
I remember, it was one of the best laughs in the scene.
But experience is the name we all give to our mistakes.

What, as a matter of fact, is so significant as our mis-
takes? Certainly our successes are not so instructive.
As I quickly review my own experience, more largely
mistakes th&n I have felt at liberty to burden others
with, and attempt the difficult feat of a summary, I find
myself fronting the task with attention directed in such
home-made method as mere habit has formed.

What is it that a patient friend would like me to re-
port— a friend, let us say, like the poet stranger who has
read some early chapters of this stuff and is moved to
write to me this month of April, 1922, from beside his

454

INFLUENCES: BOOKS AND MEN

455

kerosene lamp in the town of Lost Cabin, Wyoming?
Perhaps he would ask: "What have been the most po-
tent influences you have known? Or to what opinions
and beliefs have these influences and their consequent
effects led you or inclined you?" That's what I'd like
to ask any man whose book Fve read. Perhaps that is
what we all are practically asking every book.

Among the influences important to me have been a
few men, more fine reputations, and still more fine books,
some fine women, some music, both rather simple and
both quite old-fashioned. The books, after the nursery
jumble was past, were, in order of discovery, the Bible,
Shakespeare, some other poets already named, Wash-
ington Irving, Holmes, Hawthorne, IngersoII, Plutarch,
Emerson, Doctor Thomas Jay Hudson, William James,
Thomas Jefferson, Hugo, Voltaire, Montaigne. I think
the Bible, Shakespeare, Holmes, and Emerson influenced
my vocabulary as far as it was permeable under the cal-
lous of the railroad yard.

I didn't select the reading by any superior resolve or
instinct. The New Testament I learned by rote to re-
cite in Sunday-school for tickets exchangeable for prizes.
I have a recollection of reciting on one Sunday one hun-
dred and forty-four verses, beginning with, "In those
days came John the Baptist," and so on. This was not
a religious exercise with us boys. It was a business prop-
osition, I have since gone to the New Testament with
various motives; once to study out and as far as pos-
sible deduce from the speech and story the personal ap-
pearance of the Man of Nazareth when there was a proj-
ect to produce a passion play. The Old Testament I
read for its entertaining stories, skipping, boy-fashion,
the begats.

him. Plutarch was an assignment on the Missouri Re*
publican. One day in 1887 I brought in the "Life of
Lycurgus," revamped and adapted to the space of two
columns and a half of dialogue between two boys, one
of whom had read the story and was telling it to the
other. This voluntary selection so pleased Frank O'Neill*
the editor, that I was assigned to do one or two of the
lives every week. I think there are fifty altogether. I
rewrote and illustrated forty of them. One may learn
much in reading a history such as Plutarch's "Life of
Caesar/' but he learns it much more thoroughly when
he is required to condense and rewrite it.

Emerson's essays were first called vividly to my at-
tention by a little actress named Dudley who was in our
Dickson's Sketch Club. She seemed to get a good deal
of poise and self-possession from them. The essays fasci-
nated me, and my first purchase of books, when I had
a house of my own, was the Concord edition of Emer-
son's complete works in twelve volumes. In the year
1909 the same publishers issued a ten-volume edition of
Emerson's "Journals." These were edited from his
entries in his private journals from the year 1820, when
he was seventeen years of age, until 1881, when he was
in his seventy-eighth year. No writing could be more
revealing than these almost daily notes and comments
upon his observations, and his thoughts about the things
he saw and the books he read. They let a reader into the
very springs or fountainheads of Emerson's utterances
throughout his life, and permit a study of the form and

drilled, into tne consciousness ot nearly all children raised
under a church influence. Much as I admired IngersoII,
his unstinted eulogy of Voltaire did not remove this prej-
udice. In France I was astonished to see the life-sized
seated figure of Voltaire by Houdon in the foyer of the
Theatre Franfais, and was again impressed by the stand-
ing statue by Caille on the Quai Malaquais in front of
the building of Ulnstitut de France. I began to believe
there must be something admirable in the man, when
at the most prominent points on both sides of the Seine
a nation so honored him in its capital. Under the arcade
of the Theatre Odeon, in one of the rows of bookstalls
there, I saw a large octavo edition of Voltaire, bound in
leather, printed in 1829, on fine linen paper, no longer
employed, so far as I know, in the manufacture of books.
The edition consisted of fifty-four uniform volumes. The
price was one franc each — a total of ten dollars and
eighty cents in American money. I bought them as a
possibly foolish adventure in property book backs. The
dramas, being principally in verse, had little interest for
me; but the numerous essays and letters were the most
delightful reading.

To my astonishment, I found that the religious views
of these great men, from Plutarch to Emerson, were not
far enough apart to have the difference a matter of dis-
cussion. They all thought alike and expressed themselves
in similar terms. Then one day I read in Emerson's
latest notes, written in his sixty-sixth year, this single
detached line: "When I find in people narrow religion1
I find narrow reading." My own reading is regrettably.

its possessor tnrougn nis me n ne win permit it to guide
him In his own conduct. But there is enough tyranny
in any one of them to make its possessor intolerable when
he attempts by force to impose his belief upon another.

In 1890 Funk and Wagnalls, encouraged by eighteen
hundred gentlemen connected with the enterprise under
the designation of patrons, printed what was called the
"Jeffersonian Cyclopedia/' This volume, as large as a
law-book, contains over a thousand pages, with alpha-
betically arranged utterances of Mr. Jefferson, ranging
from a line or two to paragraphs of half a column, and
numerically listed to the number of nine thousand two
hundred and twenty-eight quotations. In an appendix
to these there is a document drawn by Mr. Jefferson in
the year 1786 for the Assembly of Virginia, entitled, "A
Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom/* In the body
of this bill, which is before me, is this sentence: "Our
civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions
any more than our opinions of physics and chemistry/*

This valuable book was a gift to me. The distinguished
donor was Mr. William Jennings Bryan, and I am having
a little difficulty in reconciling my idea of Mr. Bryan's
admiration for the book and his recent earnest endeavor
— which failed only by a vote of forty-two to forty-one
— to persuade the Kentucky Legislature to forbid the
discussion of the theory of evolution in the public schools
because it didn't square with his deductions upon geology
as set forth in the Book of Genesis. One glides so easily
in these days from a discussion of religious beliefs into
the consideration of questions political that I am impelled

INFLUENCES: BOOKS AND MEN 459

to take in lazy fashion this chance for digression and
move on to a statement of my political views.

As a page-boy in Congress I was made aware of the
two theories of government in America: the one advanced
and advocated by Alexander Hamilton, whose genius
nobody seems to dispute, and which as a matter of simple
reference may be called the system of centralization;
the other — the Jefferson idea — or the system of local
self-government. All through my life, between those
page-boy days and now, I have heard discussions of these
two theories and occasionally had glimpses of the ap-
plication of one or the other theory in practice. In my
own mind I have finally come to something like an ad-
justment between them for America. I am not sure that
my conclusions are right, but they have that consoling
quality that sometimes comes with a decision — namely,
peace. There has also been economy of time and atten-
tion through having some beliefs that were not dissolving
views. One important contribution to this state of mind
was made late in the year 1891, when I found at a book-
stall a small octavo volume by John Fiske entitled "Civil
Government in the United States." I read it carefully,
and at times I studied it. In a bibliographical note on
page 274, in a list of books valuable to the student of
government, Mr. Fiske wrote the following:

A book of great merit, which ought to be reprinted as it is now
not easy to obtain, is Toulmin Smith's " Local Self-Government and
Centralization," London, 1851. Its point of view is sufficiently in-
dicated by the following admirable pair of maxims (p. 12):

"Local self-government is that system of government under which
the greatest number of minds, knowing the most, and having the
fullest opportunities of knowing it, about the special matter in hand,
and having the greatest interest in its well-working, have the man-
agement of it, or control over it.

management of it, or control over it."

An immense amount of wretched misgovernment would be avoided
if all legislators and all voters would engrave these wholesome defini-
tions upon their minds.

Later in a campaign, I quoted these two maxims at
a meeting at which Mr. William Jennings Bryan was
and I was "also." Mr. Bryan asked where I said I had
got them, and then asked to have them typewritten for
him. He subsequently used them, giving proper credit
to their author. He told me they were the best defini-
tions that he had ever heard for the purpose of showing
the difference in the two systems of government. Cer-
tain benevolent considerations have recently made Mr.
Bryan swerve a little from his complete reliance on local
self-government, but I am going to hang onto my ad-
miration for the system. I have thought there might be
found a workable interplay of the two systems in our
government — in all internal affairs; that is to say, in
everything that affects our own well-being as a great
commonwealth, the system of local self-government
adopted and adhered to; in all questions that deal with
our relations as a government to the governments of
other countries, the system of centralization.

Something of the kind seems to have been in the minds
of the founders when they wrote in Section II, Article II,
of the Constitution: "The President shall be commander
in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States and
of the militia of the several States when called into the
actual service of the United States."

INFLUENCES: BOOKS AND MEN 461

This seems to apprehend national emergencies and
something like centralization in meeting them. Also,
all of those powers granted to Congress in Section VIII,
Article I, under the heads of taxes, duties, imposts, coin-
age of money, weights and measures, punishment of coun-
terfeiting, piracies and felonies on the high seas, and
offenses against the laws of nations are on the centraliza-
tion system. In the field of local self-government seem
to lie those rights listed in the first ten amendments which
Mr. Jefferson advised adopting before all the States rati-
fied the Constitution, so that there should be no doubt
about what powers were surrendered by the local govern-
ments to the central one, and what powers were by the
central one definitely acquired. This may be saying
"an undisputed thing in such a solemn way," but it has
been a comforting possession. It has made me a Jeffer-
sonian American. It has even enabled me to keep from
meddling in family matters that seem to fall into similar
but self-governing departments, such as those assumed
by married children. And finally it has helped me to
preserve a schoolboy respect for both those eminent and
admirable characters, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas
Jefferson, who were looking at the same shield from dif-
ferent sides.

Another department of life that I have thought a good
deal about has been that of labor. As a lad I was with
the working people; people with callous not only on their
hands but well up the forearm where a brake-wheel
caught it. I think every man should be capable of sus-
taining himself by the labor of his hands. I was quite
a middle-aged person, much pampered and self-indulged,
when I saw James M. Barrie's play, "The Admirable
Crichton," in which a submerged butler of the English

tnan our own, as tar as i coma judge wrtnout oemg a
part of it; a finer intercourse between the different social
stations; the politeness of a stone-mason on the top of
a bus asking a duke for a match with which to light a
cigarette, and the fraternal compliance without mockery
or condescension. And after a while I came to learn that
that relationship had been acquired by men of those
classes working in fine equality in their military training.

When the war was on and our American young men
were enlisted and drafted I saw so many clerks and pro-
fessional youngsters improved by the rough manual work
that the army made them do that I became an advocate
of universal military training, for the sole reason that it
would give the government the power to call young men
out of the mines, let us say, and send them elsewhere on
other duties and to replace them by a lot of young fel-
lows that are now selling neckties and watching stock
tickers, who could be sent down into the mines as part
of their training. One or two months of this transposing
in their formative years, nineteen to twenty-one, would
give them sympathetic understanding of the men who
are performing the basic material and manual tasks. It
might answer some other problems. Eight or ten years
of such successive assignments would see the country
equipped with a body of citizens not in those industries
but yet partially educated in mining, railroading, and
the like, which would be a great stabilizer.

A few lines above I said that I was with the working
people. Maybe it will be well to confess that I am a
little partisan about it. I know that is so because I sel-

INFLUENCES: BOOKS AND MEN ,463

V -4*

dom read of a strike anywhere without the perhaps un-
fair hope that the strikers will be successful; this quite
outside of the merits of the dispute. When this partisan-
ship appears I trace it as confirming a remembered prov-
erb about training a child in the way he should go. In
a rather poverty-stricken boyhood I grew committed to
the side of the workers. I favor organized labor; but
recently in our Society of American Dramatists, which
after all is a kind of labor-union itself or at least a guild,
when the proposition came up to join the American Fed-
eration of Labor, I was opposed to it; and because of
my opposition I felt hopeful. I remember reading some-
where that an expert hatter had said there were only
two professional classes whose heads didn't change in
size between the years of adolescence and old age. These
two professions were clergymen and actors. Having
been an actor for a while, and having felt a good deal
like a clergyman in other whiles, I thought maybe I fell
within these restrictions; but if, despite my sympathy
for organized labor, I was opposed to going into its fed-
eration the chances were that I somehow had escaped
the hatter's arrested development.

I was aware of a new idea, although I found that it
leaned upon my old preconceptions concerning machinery.
Only to feed a machine seems to me a dreary thing; for
example, to do what I am told men in certain automobile
manufactories do— put apparently the same nut upon
apparently the same bolt hour after hour and day after
day as the piecework on an endless belt passes for a mo-
ment in front of them. That in its monotony must be
as near hell as any work can be. I think all men so work-
ing or similarly engaged, men whose work is not measured
in man-power, should be not only in unions but in a fed-

JUU.JLlia.JUL U.1111,, CL11U. CL1 UCI

There is a kind of artisanship in laying Bis courses to
plumb line and in finishing the surface seams. Ther<
a measurable degree of self-expression in bricklayi
also, in other handicrafts.

I $,m not persuaded that everybody who gets any w.
for anything should be in a federation against everybc
who pays any wage. It seems to me, in my untraii
approach of the question, that such a division cor
pretty near to being class warfare. And if this repul
is what Mr. Jefferson and I hoped it would be it should
harbor or inspire or cultivate class warfare. And whet]
I am right about the bricklayers or not, I thought tl
the dramatists and perhaps college professors and arti
of all kinds, and any other men who deal more or less
ideas, and are not simply feeding raw material to n
chines, and who because they deal in ideas may so:
day be called upon to arbitrate, or at least mediate
these industrial collisions, should stay outside of the f<
eration. In the long run it might be better for the fc
eration to have them do so. I feel that these are prel
big-league questions, and maybe far beyond my stati
in life; but they are products of experiences that ha
made me feel and perhaps made me think.

Aside from these gems on religion and politics and .
bor, I have some impressions about art and literature, a:
especially about standards in each of those departmen
which people must be anxious to learn; but as they a
good subjects for special essays, I will reserve them. M
and women who now begin to feel deserted and alone

INFLUENCES: BOOKS AND MEN 465

they draw to the end of these chapters should read over
again the last four or five pages containing my opinions
and beliefs. Men who write their recollections often
forget to include these; and really a principal object of
life is to furnish a person with opinions and beliefs — I
think.

APPENDIX

LIST OF PLAYS

The following is a list of Thomas's plays, all with the
dates of their production. Those marked with a single
asterisk (*) are one-act plays. Those with dagger (f)
were collaborations or dramatizations of books.

. Moberly, Mo.
. St. Louis, Mo.
. . St. Louis, Mo.
. . St. Louis, Mo.
. St. Louis, Mo.
. St. Louis, Mo.
. . St. Louis, Mo.
. . St. Louis, Mo.
Boston, Mass.
. New York City.
. . New York City.
. . New York City.
New York City.
. New York City.
. New York City.
. Boston, Mass.

New York City.
. . Chicago, III

. New York City.
[ . New York City.
. New York City.
. Chicago, III.

New York City.
. New York City.
'. . . New York City.
' * . New York City.

Alone

The Big Rise l882 -

*t Editha's Burglar l883 •

* A New Year's Call *883 •

* A Man of the World i883 -

* Leaf from the Woods *883 -

* A Studio Picture l883 -

Combustion l884 •

The Burglar l889 •

A Night's Frolic l89° •

* A Woman of the World ..... *89° -

* After Thoughts l89° -

Reckless Temple l89<> -

Alabama l89I

t For Money • *°92

Surrender l893

f Colonel Carter of Cartersviile . . 1893

InMizzoura x°p3

* A Proper Impropriety *°93

* The Music Box l894

The Capitol

NewBIood

* The Man Upstairs l°9*

Colonel George of Mt. Vernon . . 1895

* That Overcoat ^

t The Jucklins ; - Ib9°

1 467

468 THE PRINT OF MY REMEMBRAI

t Chimmie Fadden 1897 .• . NewYc

The Meddler 1898 . . NewYc

*t Holly Tree Inn . 1898 . . NewYc

The Hoosier Doctor 1898 . . Washin,

f The Bonnie Briar Bush 1898 . . New Yc

Arizona 1898 . . Chicago

On the Quiet 1900 . . NewYc

Oliver Goldsmith 1900 . . NewYo

Champagne Charley 1901 . . NewYo

Colorado 1901 .. NewYo

t Soldiers of Fortune 1902 . . New Yo

The Earl of Pawtucket . . . 1903 . . New Yo

The Other Girl 1903 . . New Yo

t The Education of Mr. Pipp . . . 1905 . . New Yo

Mrs. LeffingwelPs Boots 1905 . . New Yo

De Lancey 1905 • • New Yo

The Embassy Ball 1905 . . New Yo

The Ranger 1907 . . New Yo

The Member from Ozark .... 1907 . . Detroit,

The Witching Hour 1907 . . New Yo

The Harvest Moon 1909 . . New Yo

The Matinee Idol 1909 . . New Yo

As a Man Thinks 1911 . . NewYo

The Model 1912 . . New Yo

Mere Man 1912 . . NewYo

t At Bay 1913 . . NewYo

t Three of Hearts 1913 .. NewYo

Indian Summer 1913 . . New Yo:

t The Battle Cry 1914 . . NewYo:

The Nightingale 1914 . . NewYo:

Rio Grande 1916 . . Chicago,

The Copperhead 1917. - NewYo:

Palmy Days 1920 . . New YOJ

* Tent of Pompey 1920 . . New Yo:

Nemesis 1921 . . NewYoj

INDEX

Abeles, Edward, 437

Adams, Annie, 412

Adams, Edwin, I39/.

Adams, Maude, 270, 303 ff.

''Admirable Crichton, The/' 461 ff.

"After Thoughts," 88

"Alabama," 187, 204, 262, 291 ff., 296

ff-, 300, 305
Albert, Ernest, 130 ff.
Aldrich, Louis, 321

Alfriend, Colonel Edward, 283, 303, 323
Allen, Senator William V., 338
"Alone," 70
"Ambition," 211, 314
Anderson, Mary, 207 ff.
Anglin, Margaret, 423
"Arizona," 342, 344, 367 JfM 37§ ff., 426
Arthur, President, 24
"As a Man Thinks," 45Ojf.
"Auctioneer, The," 91
"Aunt Jack," 200 ff.
Aveling, Henry, 70, 134

Babcock, General Orville E., 127
Bainbridge, Frances, no
Bair, 20 /.
Baird, Doctor, 404
Baker, Senator Lucian, 221
Balfe, Louise, 169
Banks, General, 37, 62
Banks, Maude, 321
Barnabee, Henry, 152
Barnes, Jack, 412
Barney, Ariel, 240, 244 jf.f 253^.
Barrett boys, 256 ff.
Barrett, Lawrence, 213, 230^.
Barrie, James M., 461
Barren, Charles, 249 ff.
Barron, Elwyn, 162
Barry, Helen, 270, 285
Barrymore, Ethel, 304
Barrymore, John, 201, 262, 404 /., 422
Barrymore, Lionel, 201, 236, 395 ff;
400 /., 403 ff.

Barrymore, Maurice, 75, 88, 200 ff.t
248, 250, 260, Chas.'^XV, passim, 284
ff.t 340, 392, 431

Bates, Blanche, 425, 427

Beamer, Charles A., 76, 92

Becket, Harry, 92

Beecher, Alex, 104

Belasco, David, 425, '427 ff.

Bell, 6

Bell, Alexander Graham, 94

Bell, Digby, 270, 434

Benjamin, John F., 25, 29

Bergholz, Leo, 322 ff.

Bernard, Barney, 91

Bernhardt, Sarah, 102 Jf.f 212

Bible, 455

Bingham, 46

Bingham, John A., 58

Bishop, Washington Irving, 254 jf., 438

Bismarck, 308

Blaine, Speaker James G., 46, 56, 61,
223, 225 /.

Blair, General Frank P., 4, 17, 20 ff.

Blair, General Thomas, 33

Bland, Richard, 151

Booth, Agnes, 88, 200, 288, 291

Booth, Edwin, 213, 230 /.

Booth, John Wiikes, 13 ff.

Booth, Junius Brutus, 88

Booth, Sydney, 88

Bordley, Dan, 205

Boucicault, Dion, 40, 84, 86, 90, 287 ff.

Bowie, Colonel Jim, 33

Bradford, Joseph, 115 /.

"Brigands, The," 270

Brooke, Charles W., 278

Brooks, Joseph, 192, 316, 319 ff., 33*/-»

337 /•» 340 J., 363
Brown, John, I ff.
Bruce, Robert, 349 /-
Bruning, Albert, 247 /.
Bryan, William Jennings, 458, 460
Buchanan, President James, I ff., 1 6
Buckstone, Rowland, 365

469

470

INDEX

Burchard, Reverend Doctor, 225
"Burglar, The," 189, 192, 211, 238, 260,

Chap. XV, passim, 287, 290, 430^*.
Burnett, Frances H., 116, 118
Burroughs, Marie, 296
Bush, Frank, 90
Busley, Jessie, 413
Butler, General Benjamin F., 37, 46,

48 ff; 54 ff; 151, 179 ff.

Butler, Edward, 125
Buxton, 36

Cable, Senator, 125

Cahill, Marie, 334, 423

"Caprice, ".2 1 2

"Captain Swift," 260 ff.

Carleton, Henry Guy, 2 1 1, 314, 424

Carlisle, John G., 98

Carlyle, Frank, 315

Carnegie, Andrew, 132, 308

Carr, Alexander, 91

Carrington, Edward, 198

Carroll, Lewis, 5

"Cat and the Canary, The," 438

Cavanaugh, 17 ff; 33

Cecile, 420^.

"Celebrated Case, A," 134

Chambers, Haddon, 424

Chapman, George, 12

Charcot, 404

Chase, Arthur B., 213, 230

Chase, Mrs. Mizner, 417

"Chorus Lady, The," 423

Clapp, 268

Clarke, Thomas B., 405^.

Cle"menceau, 308

Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark

Cleveland, President Grover, 139, 225,

230, 308, 339
Clopton, W. H., 136
Cochise, 351

Cockerill, Colonel John, 135^"., 213
Cody, Colonel William F. (Buffalo Bill),

33, 144 ff.

Coghlan, Charles, 250
Cohan, George, 3, 33
Colby, Bainbridge, ill ff.t 236 ff.
Colby, John Peck, 103, iioff., 113 ff.
Colby, Luke, no
Cole, Timothy, 124
Collier, William, 333 ff., 422

"Colonel Carter," 262, 306 ff.

"Colorado," 379

"Combustion," 156 ff., 162 ff.

Comiskey, Charles A., 241

Connor, Billy, 278

Connoyer, Paul, 240

"Constitutional .Point, A," 288, 304,

435, 438

Cook, Madge Carr, 371
Cooper, Jimmy, 252
Cooper, Matt, 85 ff.
Corbett, Jim, 77
Cornell, Robert H., 25 /., 70 ff.
"Correspondent, The," 288
Corrigan, Emmett, 429^.
Cottrell, H9/.
Couldock, C. W., 140
Courtenay, Frederick, 434
Courtenay, William, 412, 434
Couzins, Major, 24
Couzins, Phoebe, 24
Cox, Samuel S. (Sunset), 46, 51 ff.
Crane, William, H5ff.t 212, 316 ff.t 332
Crawford, L. M., 231
Crockett, Ollie, 76 ff.
Cummings, Jim, 213, 295, 311 ff.
Cunningham, 123
Currier, Frank, 244, 249 j[f.
Curtis, M. B., 91, 299
Cushman, Charlotte, n, 39

"Dagmar,"i69^.

Dailey, Peter, 374

Daly, Augustin, 88, 307

Dana, Charles, 201

Darwin, Charles, 84

Davenport, E. L. (senior), 40 ff.

Davenport, Harry, 41

Davey, Tom, n

David, Mrs., 323

David, Frank, 133, 155 ff.y 161, 165,

176, 178, 190
Davies, Phcebe, 267
Davis, Fay, 41 1 ff.

Davis, Richard Harding, 357, 378, 431
Davis, Robert H., 47
Davy, Tom, 212
De Bar, Ben, n, 139 v

Debs, Eugene V., 339
de Lesseps, Ferdinand, 308
De Mille, Henry C., 329

INDEX

471

Depew, Senator Chauncey M., 47 Jf-

D6roulede, 308

De Wolfe, Drina, 40° Jf •

De Wolfe, Elsie, 400 Jf.

Dickson, i56/., 169

Dickson Sketch Club, Chap. IX, Chap.

X, 456

Dillon, John, 70 Jf.
Dillon, Louise, 7°
Dingeon, Helen, 149
Disston, William, 375 ff- „
"Don't Tell Her Husband," 37O, 37^
Dore, Gustave, 124
D'Orsay, Lawrence, 389 jf. 393 JT-i 4*3

jf.
Douglas, Byron, 149

Dow, Ada, 244 Jf., 251

Drake, Senator CD., 24 ff.

Drew, John, 50, *53, 253, 395 Jf-> 4<>o»

406 Jf.f 422 Jf.
Drew, Sydney, 263 Jf., 266
Dryden, Nat, 205 jf., 3*3
Dudley, actress, 456
Dumay, Henri, 408 Jf.
Dunn, " Eddie," 140 Jf.
Dunn, Jerry, 279
Dyer, David P., 25, 29

Eads, James Buchanan, 73

Eames, William S., 323

"Earl of Pawtucket," 214, 393 #•» 4*3

Eastman, Monk, 17

Edgar, W. C, 161

"Editha's Burglar," 68, 118, 154.

"Education of Mr. PipP," 43* Jf-
Edwards, Billy, 77, 281
Edwards, Major John, 126 jf.
Ellert, L. S., 309
Elliott, Maxine, 307, 333, 434 IT-
Elton, Ernest, 393 Jf •
"Embassy Ball, The," 414 ff-
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, I, 238, 455 J
Emerson's Journal, 47 Jf.
Emmett, Eliza, 10, 35
Emmett, Jo. K., 10, 35, 9O
Erlanger, A. L., 169 Jf., 299 /•» 3<>7

"Erminie," 211

"Esmeralda," 116

Eustace, Jennie, 446

Eustace, Mayor William Henry, 309

Evans, Charley, 366
Bvans, Lizzie, 145
Bverett, 6

Fairbanks, Douglas, 352

"Famous Mrs. Fair, The," 423

Fanning, Mike A., 191, 259

Farnsworth, John F., 59

Farragut, II

Farrell, Bob, 77

Faversham, William, 75

Fay, Frank, 46

Fay, Hugh, 90

Fenlon, Thomas P., 220 fit., 347

"Ferncliffe," 270

Fetter, Selina, 401

Field, Roswell M., 230

Fielding, Maggie, 401

Fisk, Colonel Jim, 279

Fiske, Harrison Grey, 444

Fiske, Mrs. Harrison Grey. See Macl-

dern, Minnie
Fiske, John, 459
Fitch, Clyde, 330, 379, 3^9, 424
Flanigan, Captain P., 85 Jf.
Flint, Charles R., 47
Flood, John, 452
Florence, W. J. (Billy), 13? /•
"Florence's Mighty Dollar, 90
Flower, Roswell P., 3°8
Flynn, Phil, 380 Jf.
Fogel, Clark (Bert Clark), 90
4 'For Money," 31**
Forbes, James, 423
Forbes-Robertson, Sir Johnston, 207
Forrest, Edwin, II, 264
Foster, Major Emery S., 125 Jf.
Fox, Delia, 134, i54Jf-» l62^» *76' l84

Jf., 190

Fox, John, Jr., 422
Fox, Lily, 134
Foy, Eddie, 75

Francis, Honorable David R., 259
Frawley, T. D., 37<>Jf.
Frick, Henry, 3°8

Friedlander, 371 ort -

Frohman, Charles, 153, 188 J-, 236^.,
264, 300 Jf., 316, 320 Jf., 341, 362, 365,
378, 393 /-» 407 /•. 4ii /•. 414 Jf-.

424, 441 Jf-
Frohman, Daniel, 270, 370, 442

472

INDEX

Fuller, Chief Justice, 98
Fyles, Franklin, "The Governor of
Kentucky," 332

Gale, Minna, 233

"Gamblers, The," 423

Gardner, Amelia, 453

Garfield, President, 37, 58, 151

Garland, Hamlin, "The Tyranny of the
Dark," 96

Garrettson, Daniel, 7

Garrettson, Sarah Wilson (grandmother
of Augustus Thomas), 7jf., 16, 18, 38,
96 Jf.

Garvey, Eddie, 374 ff. .
Gates, Frank E., 131
Gates, Si, 131

Gebhard, Frederick, 122 Jf., 405 ff.
Geistinger, Marie, 152
Gibson, Charles Dana, 431 jf.
Gillette, William, 116, 126, 137 Jf., 212,

358 Jf., 389

Gillig, Harry M., 316 Jf.
Gilmore, E. G., 277
Gilmour, Jack, 331
Gilroy, Thomas F., 309
"Girl I Left Behind Me, The," 301
"Girl of the Golden West, The," 425
Gladstone, 308
Golden, John L., 285
Goodwin, Nat, 46, 211, 213, 295, 310 jf.,

333, 430, 434 ff.
Gottlob, 371

Gouger, Helen M., 218, 221 Jf., 347
Gould, Jay, 85
Grant, Nellie, 4
Grant, General Ulysses S., I, 3 Jf., n,

20, 127, 151

"Great Divide, The," 423
Greene, Clay M., 302, 316 Jf.
Grey, Katherine, 340
Grismer, Joseph, 266 Jf.
Guiteau, Charles Jules, 151
Gutherz, Carl, loojf.

Hagen, Claude, 231 jf.
Hagerman, James, 205 jf.
Hale, Louise Closser, 373

Hale,Walter, 365, 37ijf.,452
Hall, Owen, 424
Hall, Pauline, 149, 211

Hamilton, Alexander, 459, 461

Hamilton, Frank, 167, 228 ff.

Hamlin, Harry, 369 jf.

Hammond, Dorothy, 412

Hampden, Walter, 248

Hancock, General, 50, 132

Handy, Moses P., 278

Hardens Military Tactics, 19

Harlow, Will, 67 Jf.

Harney, Paul, 100

Harris, Charles L., 290

Harris, William, 169

Harrison, Mayor, 309

Harte, Bret, 439 ff.

"Harvest Moon, The," 447

Harwood, Harry, 414 j^".

Hatton, Joseph, "John Needham's
Double," 296

Haworth, Joe, 201

Hayes, President, 151

Hayman, Alf., 12, 424

Hein, Silvio, 448, 450

"Held by the Enemy," 126, 212

Henderson, Senator John B., 127

"Henrietta, The," 212

Herford, Oliver, 27

Herne, Chrystal, 452 ff.

Heron, Bijou, 12

Heron, Matilda, 12

Hicks, "Bicycle," 197 ff.

Higgins, Mrs., 272

Hill, J. M., 274, 277, 288, 299

Hinckley, Emma, 250

"His House in Order," 423

"His Last Legs," 71, 163 Jf., 176 Jf.,

449 f-

Hoey, Bill, 366

Holland, E. M., 289, 291, 307, 33L
338

Holland, Joseph, 264^., 331

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 30, 438, 454 Jf.

Hooker, E. R., 350 ff.

Hooker, Forrestine, 350

Hooker, Henry C., 350 Jf.

Hopper, De Wolf, 71, 448 Jf.

Howard, Bronson, 212, 269, 323 ff.,
328 Jf., 389

Howard, Joseph, Jr., 211, 216

Howe, Will H., 103

Howells, William Dean, "The Ele-
vator," etc., 178, 329

INDEX

473

Hoyt, Charles, 298

Hudson, Doctor Thomas, 403, 438

Hugo, Victor, I ff.

Hutchens, Stilson, 127

Hyde, Colonel William, 126

Hyslop, Doctor, 96

Illington, Margaret, 412

"In Camp," 148

"In Mizzoura," 213, 425 ff.

Ingersoll, Ebon Clark, 56 ff.

Ingersoll, Colonel Robert G., 56 ff., 95,

152, 224

Insley, M. H., 223
Irving, Washington, 40
Irwin, Doctor J. A., 259
Ives, Professor Halsey C., 100

Jackson, Andrew, II

Jackson, Governor Claiborne, 28

James, William, Mystical Faculty,

Biff.

Janet, 404
Janis, Elsie, 146
Jaur&s, Jean, 366
Jefferson, Charles, 299
Jefferson, Joseph, 40, 98 ff., 138
Jefferson, Thomas, 198 ff., 458 ff.
Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, 458
Jeffries, Jim, 385
Jennings, Johnny, 199, 205
Jerrold, Blanchard, 124
Jepson, Mrs. Eugene, 434
Jessop, George, 310
Johns, George Sibley, 200, 213
Johnson, Vice-President, 14
Johnson, Tom, 191
Jones, Charles H., 239^.
Jones, Henry Arthur, 296, 389, 423
Jones, Walter, 150

Kansas City Mirror, 228 ff.
Karl, Tom, 152
Kearney, Dennis, 151
Kelly, 137

Kelly, Mamie, 196 ff.
Kemble, E. W., 324 ff.
Kent, Doctor, 147
"King John," 87 ff.
Klaw, 299
Klein, Alfred, 449

Klein, Charles, 91, 145, 423
Knapp, Charles, 239
Knight, Percy, 429
Knights of Labor, 105 ff.
Knott, Proctor, 59 ff.
Kretchmar, Howard, 101

Lackaye, Wilton, 155 Jf., 263, 286, 338,

388

"Lady of the Lake/' 40
La Farge, Miss, 16
Lambs Club, 275 ff., 286 /., 342 /., 362

ff., 426, 429, 437 ff., 446, 450
Lancaster, 125
Lane, Mike, 203
La Shelle, Kirke, 295, 363, 367 /., 393

ff-> 434

Latham, Arlie, 241 ff.
Lawford, Ernest, 412
Lee, Harry, 379 ff., 387 ff.
Levy, J., 259
"Lightnin'," 71
Lincoln, Abraham, iff., 5ff.,n, 13 Jf.,

41 ff., 44, 46 /.
Lincoln, Luther J. B., 341 ff.
Lindsley, Guy, 115
"Lion and the Mouse, The," 423
Littleton, Honorable Martin, 47
Lockwood, Belva A., 179
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 308, 338
Logan, General John A., 37, 61 ff.
"London Assurance," 139
"Lord Chumley," 270
Lothian, Napier, 208
"Love and Liberty," 270
Luther, Martin, 289

Macauley, Barney, 119, 145

Macauley, Daniel, 119

Macauley, John, 189

Macauley, Margaret, 119

"Macbeth," 40, 139

Mackaye, Percy, 152

Mackaye, Steele, 152

Maddern, Dick, 133

Maddern, Minnie, 12, 133, 145, 212

Magner, John, 195, 197, 200, 202 ff.,

209, 216
"Man of the World, A," 200, 262, 274,

287
Mansfield, Josie, 279

474

INDEX

Mantell, Robert, 211

Markham, Pauline, 92

Marlowe, Julia, 240, Chap. XIV, passim

Marple, W. S., 100

Mason, John, 324, 373, 444 ff., 450,

452

Mason, Peter, 424 ff.
"Matin6e Idol, The," 449 /.
Matthews, Brander, 292, 310, 330
Matthews, Charles, 261, 267
Matthews, Nathan, 309
Mawson, Harry P., 424
Maxwell, 214
McClellan, n

McClure, Colonel S. S., 254
McCormack, Jack, 369
McCormick, 6 ff.
McCoy, Kid, 369, 396, 401
McCready, Wayman, 117
McCullough, John, 70
McCullough Club, 114 ff.
McDonald, Will, 152
McDowell, Henry B., 328 ff.
McFeelam, Teddy, 162
Mclntosh, Burr, 297
McKee, Frank, 374
McKinley, President William, 308,

376 ff.

McKissock, Colonel Tom, 16
McManus, George, 141 ff., 158
McWade, Edward, 247
Meade, General George, 41 ff.
Meade, Margaret, 41 ff.
Meeker, J. R., 100, 102
Megargee, Louis N., 278
"Men and Women," 301
Menken, Adah Isaacs, 12
"Merchant, The," 300 ff.
Merrick, Leonard, 402
"Messenger from Jarvis Station, The,"

Metcalf, 139
Meyers, Sam, 424^.
Michler, Captain Francis, 336
Mickle, William Julius, 83
"Middleman, The," 296
"Midnight Bell, A," 270
"Mighty Dollar, The," 137
Miles, Bob, 144
Miles, General Nelson A., 336
Miley, John B., 286 ff.

Miller, of the St. Louis Browns, 78

Miller, Agnes, 290

Miller, Gilbert, 12

Miller, Henry, 318, 423

Miller, Mrs. Henry, 12

Mitchell, Dodson, 247

"Mile. Modiste," 422

Modjeska, Mme. Helena, 244, 250, 274

Moliere, 84

"Monte Cristo," 212

Montgomery, 208 ff.

Moody, William Vaughan, 423

Moore, managing editor, 216^.

Moore, Henry, 191

Morrison, Lewis, 152

Morrissey, John, 58

Morton, Martha, "The Merchant,"

300 ff.

"Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots," 411 ff., 441
"Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,"

423
"Muldoon's Picnic," 90, 176 ff., 212,

438

Munson, George, 240
Murphy, Patrick Francis, 47
Murray, Hallett, see Palmoni
"My Milliner's Bill," 270
Myer, Captain, 353 ff.

"Nadjesda," 274

Nash, George, 446

Nast, Tom, 95, 132

Naylor, Fred, 85

Neely, Mayor S. F., 217 ff.

Nelson, Henry Loomis, 435

"Never Again," 306

"New Blood," 262, 337

New York Press Club, 137

New York World, 125, Chap. XII,

passim

Nicholson, Captain, 347
"Night's Frolic, A," 285
Norton, John W., 89, 144, 207, 254
Nowak, Adelaide, 447
Nye, Bill, 82

Olcott, Chauncey, 365

"Old Homestead, The," 270, 299, 438

Olympic Theatre, Chicago, 70

"On the Quiet," 333

O'Neil, James, 212

INDEX

475

O'Neill, Eugene, 134

O'Neill, Frank, 239

O'Neill, James, 134

"Oolah, The," 270

Orrick, John D., 24

"Other Girl, The," 236, 304, 400

Otis, Elita Proctor, 340 ff.

"Our American Cousin," 138

Owen, Billy, 249

Owens, John E., n6ff., 186 jf.

Page, Nellie, 165, 185
Palmer, A. M., 86, 88, 200 jf., 283, 287
ff., 291 ff., 295 jf., 300, 306 /., 340

Jf., 435 Jf.

Palmer, Charles, 161
Palmoni, 39 ff., 43, 134 /.
Pastor, Tony, 88, 277
Payne, Louis, 412
Pierce, President Franklin, I ff.
Pingree, Mayor, 309
Pitou, Augustus, 283
"Pittsburgh," 192
Pius IX, Pope, 9
Plato, Republic, 335
Plutarch, 455 ff.

Pope, of Pope's Theatre, St. Louis, 231
Pope, Charles R., 118 jf., 139, 192
Pope's Theatre, i$off.
"Potash and Perlmutter," 91
Potter, Clarkson N., 45
Potter, Paul, 281 /., 424, 431, 437
Powderly, Terence V., 105, 109
Preller, 214
Presbrey, Eugene, 204, 290, 294, 316

Jf., 321, 330, 332, 450
Prescott, Marie, 152
"Professor, The," 137, 212
Pulitzer, Joseph, 125 ff., 408
Pullman, George M., 339
Purcell, Archbishop, 9, n, 96
Putnam, William F., 68
"Pyramids, The," 133

Quantrell's Guerillas, 126

Rankin, Gladys, 264
Rankin, McKee, 315
Rawling, Sylvester, 101, 103
Raymond, John, 134

Reardon, Steve, 33

"Reckless Temple," 262, 274, 288^".

Red Cloud, 53

Redding, Joseph D., 358 ff.

Reedy, William Marion, 135, 191

Remington, Frederic, 70, 324 ff., 329,

335 /., 344, 357, 3?8, 432 jf.
Revel family, 12
Rice, Alice H., 423
Riley (entomologist), 27
Riley, James Whitcomb, 82
"Rip Van Winkle," 40
Ritchie, John, 254 /., 258 jf.
Robbins, Doctor Tom, 417
Robertson, 117
"Robinson Crusoe," 92 Jf.
Robinson, Forrest, 416, 437
Robson, Eleanor, 371 jf., 423
Robson, Stuart, 115 jf., 212, 316, 372
Robyn, A. G., 115
Roosevelt, Theodore, 113, 292, 358
Root, Elihu, 58
Rosenfeld, Sydney, 322 Jf.
Rosenquest, Wesley, 269
Rostand, Edmond, 428
Roth, Nat, 134
"Rough Diamond, The," 270
Royle, Edwin Milton, 230, 401, 426, 438
Ruckstull, Frederick W., 69, 79, 103,

326 ff., 365, 397
Russell, Annie, 316
Russell, Lillian, 270
Ryder, Billy, 17

Si. Louis Post-Dispatch, 135 jf., Chap.

XI, passim

St. Louis Sketch Club, 101 ff., 131
Salisbury, Charles, 144
Salisbury, Nate, I44jf.
Salisbury's Troubadours, 144
Salvini, 152

Sampson, William, 446, 452
"Samuel of Posen," 91
Sargent, Franklin Haven, 75
Saville, John G., 412
Scharit, Honorable Augustus Wallace,

38/., 42, 62, 97, 134 Jf-
Scheff, Fritzi, 422

Schenck, General Robert C., 37, 52
"School Mistress, The," 212
Schultz, Minnie, 149

476

INDEX

Schurz, Carl, 24 Jf., 39

Schwab, Charles, 47, 109

Scott, Dred, 2, 6

Scott, John, Earl of Eldon, 107

Scott, Sir Walter, 40, 83

Scratches and Sketches, 67

Serrano, Vincent, 365, 371 /., 412, 452

Sexton, H. Clay, 64 jf.

Seymour, Governor Horatio, 20

Seymour, Willie, 264

Shakespeare, 456

Shaler, General Alexander, 210 ff.

Shaw, Doctor Albert, 339

Shaw, Mary, 247 ff., 250, 268, 330

Shea, Tommy, 424

Sheedy, Pat, 279

"Shenandoah," 269

Sheridan, Emma V., 263 ff.

Sheridan, General George, 266, 279, 284

Sheridan, General Phil, 65 ff., 107

Sherman, General William Tecumseh,

208 Jf.
Shook, 88

Shubert, Lee, 324, 443 ff.
Siddons, Mrs. Scott, 152
"Sir Giles Overreach," 40
Skinner, Otis, 77, 275
Slayback, Alonzo W., 135 ff., 213
Slocum, General, 37
Smith, General A. J.
Smith, Ballard, 217
Smith, Edgar, 115, 155 ff., 161, 174,

176, 179, 185 jf., 190
Smith, Francis Hopkinson, 47, 306
Smith, William Beaumont, 115
Smythe, Doctor, 22 ff.
Smythe, William G., 115, 161, 164 Jf.,

174, 176, 183, 190, 192, 211, 240,

260 ff., 267, 270 ff., 335
Snell, Edward, 101
Snell, George, 101, 103, 112
Snell, Henry Bayley, 103
Sothern (the elder), 137 ff.
Sothern, Edward H., 189, 192, 238,

270

Spaulding, Charles, n8jf.
Spink, Al, 240 ff.
"Squaw Man, The," 426 Jf., 438
Stahl, Rose, 423
Steitz,i94, 209 jf.

Stevenson, Charles, 153

Stinson, Fred, 244 Jf,, 247, 253

Stockton, Frank, "Squirrel Inn/' 330

Stoddart, James H., 140, 200, 210

Stokes, Ned, 279

Stone, Mrs. Alice Buck, 35 ff.

Stone, Blair, 35

Stone, Major (Fighting Harry), 35 ff.

Stone, Patti, 35

Strahan, "The New Hyperion," 194

Sullivan, John L., 279

Sullivan, John T., 264, 266

Sullivan, William, 156 /., 162 ff., 170,

172, 176 ff., iSiff.
Summerhayes, Captain Jack, 345 Jf.
Sumner, Nan, 360
Sumner, Colonel Sam, 350
Sumner, Colonel Win, 345 ff., 348 Jf.,

355

Surratt, Mrs. 14
"Surrender," 320
Sutro, Alfred, 402
"Sweethearts," 163

Taber, Robert, 250

Taussig, 34

Taylor, General, II

Taylor, Howard P., 212, 270

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 443

"Third Degree, The," 423

Thomas, Mrs. Augustus, 312 ff., 364

Thomas, Governor Charles, 379, 388

Thomas, Captain Elihu (father of
Augustus Thomas), 3, II ff., 16, 18,
28, 33, 38 ff., 66 ff., 69 Jf., 75 ff., 95
ff., 146 jf., 150, 180

Thomas, General George H., 5, 61

Thompson, Denman, 270, 299, 438

Thompson, Lydia, 92

"Three Days Out," 365

Tilden, 151

Tracy, James M., 100

"Treadway of Yale," 333

"Trilby," 307

Turner, Frank, 125

Tweed, Bill, 95

Twain, Mark, 32, 299, 435 Jf., 438

Tyree, Elizabeth, 393

linger, Frank,

INDEX

Van Dyke, Doctor Henry, 310
Victoria, Queen of England, I
Vokes family, 148^.
Vokes, Rosina, 148, 212, 270
Voltaire, 457

Walker, State Senator J. J., 51

Walker, William, 7

Warfield, David, 91, 423

Waterbury, James, 357

Watterson, Colonel Henry, 98 Jf., 139,

i89/., 239, 298
Weathersby, Eliza, 92
Webster, Daniel, n, 48
Well, Honorable Erastus, zSff.t 33, 49,

Wells, Rolla, 28
Wells, W. N., 5
Westford, Owen, 149
Wheatcroft, Nelson, 330 ff.
Wheelock, Joseph, 88, 330
Wheelock, Joseph, Jr., 88, 365, 401 ff.
White, Horatio S., 78
White, Le Grand, 133

Whytal, Russ, 445 ff.

Wilde, Oscar, 220, 454

Willard, E. S., 292, 296

Willard, John, 438

Willet, Mittens, 7° /., 134

Williams, Gus, 90

Williams, Jesse, 117

Wilson, Francis, 211, 270, 409 /

Winter, William, The Wallet of

306 /.

"Winter's Tale," 208
"Witching Hour, The," 288

Chap. XXIV, passim
Witham, Alice, 10
Witthers, William, 133
Wood, Fernando, 58
Wood, Colonel Leonard, 358
Woodruff, Harry, 290 jf., 332 ff.
Worthing, Frank, 400
Wycoff, Eliza Emmett, 10

Young, Thomas, 323
Zangwill, Israel, 423

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