Stage Confidences: Talks About Players and Play Acting

e interruption. It was a domestic tragedy of English rural life, and one act began with a tableau copied

ng old grandsire leaned heavily on his staff; the devoted wife sat wearily by the closed iron gate, with a babe on her breast, tired but vigilant;

nd, and a fine lot of trouble the stage-manager had. He declared half the children of Columbus had been through his sieve; and there was the trouble-they all went through, there was no one left to act as substitute. But at last he found two promising little girls, sisters they were, and very poor; but the mother vowed her children must be in bed at nine, theatre

that the pale, pinched little face of the strange child was more effective as it rested on the dog's shoulder than had been the plump, smiling face of the manager's little one. The curtain went up, the applause followed; those behind the scenes crowded to the "wings" to look on; no one noted that the hands

amazing appearance. Her thin little legs emerged from the shortest of skirts, while her small body was well pinned up in a great blanket shawl, the point of which trailed fully a quarter of a yard on the floo

that all. No sooner had Mary Ann grasped the full meaning of this dread message than she turned over on her face, and scrambling up by all fours, she eluded the restraining hands of the actress-mother and made a hasty exit to perfect shrieks of laughter and st

the laughter was renewed. It was only necessary for some person to titter over the ludicrous recollection, and instantly the house was laughing with that person. The next night the mana

in the auditorium that night, and he told me he had never since seen a blanket shawl, whether in store for sale or on some broad back, that