characters has to take his trousers out of a handbag. He opens
the bag, but by some error no garments are within. Heavens! has
the stage manager mixed up the bags? He has only one hope. The
girlish heroine's luggage is also on the stage, and our comedian
dashes over and finds his trousers in her bag. This casts a most
sinister imputation on the adorable heroine, but our friend
(blessings on him) contrives it so delicately that the audience
doesn't get wise. Then doors that are supposed to be locked have
a habit of swinging open, and the luckless heroine, ready to say
furiously to the hero, "_Will_ you unlock the door?" finds
herself facing an open doorway and has to invent a line to get
herself off the stage.

Going on the road is a very humanizing experience and one gathers
a considerable respect for the small towns one visits. They are
so brisk, so proud in their local achievements, so prosperous and
so full of attractive shop-windows. When one finds in Johnstown,
N. Y., for instance, a bookshop with almost as well-assorted a
stock as one would see here in Philadelphia; or in Gloversville
and Newburgh public libraries that would be a credit to any large
city, one realizes the great tide of public intelligence that has
risen perceptibly in recent years. At the hotel in Gloversville
the proprietress assured us that "an English duke" had just left
who told her that he preferred her hotel to the Biltmore in New
York. We rather wondered about this English duke, but we looked
him up on the register and found that he was Sir H. Urnick of
Fownes Brothers, the glove manufacturers, who have a factory in
Gloversville. But then, being a glove manufacturer, he may have
been kidding her, as the low comedian of our troupe observed. But
the local pride of the small town is a genial thing. It may
always be noted in the barber shops. The small-town barber knows
his customers and when a strange face appears to be shaved on the
afternoon when the bills are announcing a play, he puts two and
two together. "Are you with that show?" he asks; and being
answered in the affirmative (one naturally would not admit that
one is merely there in the frugal capacity of co-author, and
hopes that he will imagine that such a face might conceivably
belong to the low comedian) he proceeds to expound the favourite
doctrine that this is a wise burg. "Yes," he says, "folks here
are pretty cagy. If your show can get by here you needn't worry
about New Yo