Mary Anderson

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Table of

dazzling white, and below the purple Atlantic sweeping in restlessly on to the New Jersey shore. The sultry day has been one of summer storm, and the wa

room. Here is a picture which might be called "a dream of fair women." Seated at the organ in the subdued light is a young woman of a strange, almost startling beauty. Her graceful figure clad in a simple black robe, unrelieved by a single ornament, is slight, and almost girlish, though there is a rounded fullness in its line which betrays that womanhood has been reached. A small classic head carried with easy grace; finely chiseled features; full, deep, gray eyes; and crowning all a wealth of auburn hair, from which peeps, as she turns, a pink, shell-like ear; these complete a picture which seems to belong to another clime and another age, and lives hardly but on the canvas of Titian. We are almost sorry to enter the room and break the spell. Mary Anderson's manner as she starts up from the organ with a light elastic spring to greet her visitors is singularly gracious and winning. There is a frank fearlessness in the beautiful speaking eyes so full of poetry and soul, a mingled tenderness and decision in the mouth, with an utter absence of that self-consciousness and coquetry w

nd there bookcases filled with favorite dramatic authors; in a corner a bust of Shakespeare; and on a velvet stand a stage dagger which once belonged to Sarah Siddons. Over the mantelpiece is a huge elk's head, which fell to the rifle of General Crook, and was presented to Mary Anderson by that renowned American hunter; and here, under a glass case, is a stuffed hawk, a deceased actor and former colleague. Dressed in appropriate costume he used to take the part of the Hawk in Sheridan Knowles' comedy of "Love," in which Mary Anderson played the Countess. The story of this bird's training is as characteristic of her pa

hioned him for

tars of eyes t

lorious spread

of might to

would fly off: and flap his wings

del

. The hawk's a

a daring, dau

ither, on both which instrument

fine view of the Atlantic as it races in mighty waves on to the beach at Long Branch. She declares that in the o

y her mistress, who is a splendid horsewoman, in a flight of five miles across the prairie in sixteen minutes. As we enter the box, Maggie turns her pretty head at sound of the familiar voice, and in response to a gentle hint, her mistress produces a piece o

r is laid on the snowy cloth, and are introduced to the charming family circle of the Long Branch villa. Though it is the home now of an old Southerner, Mary Anderson's step-father, it is a favorite trysting-place with Grant, the hero of the North, with Sherman, and many another famous man, between whom and the South there raged twenty years ago so deadly and prolo