rk. Believe me, if you get a hand here you can go
right down to Broadway. I always take in the shows, and I've
heard lots of actors say this town is harder to please than any
place they ever played."

One gets a new viewpoint on many matters by a week of one-night
stands. Theatrical billboards, for instance. We had always
thought, in a vague kind of way, that they were a defacement to a
town and cluttered up blank spaces in an unseemly way. But when
you are trouping, the first thing you do, after registering at
the hotel, is to go out and scout round the town yearning for
billboards and complaining because there aren't enough of them.
You meet another member of the company on the same errand and
say, "I don't see much paper out," this being the technical
phrase. You both agree that the advance agent must be loafing.
Then you set out to see what opposition you are playing against,
and emit groans on learning that "The Million Dollar Doll in
Paris" is also in town, or "Harry Bulger's Girly Show" will be
there the following evening, or Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties
in Person. "That's the kind of stuff they fall for," said the
other author mournfully, and you hustle around to the box office
to see whether the ticket rack is still full of unsold pasteboard.

At this time of year, when all the metropolitan theatres are
crowded and there are some thirty plays cruising round in the
offing waiting for a chance to get into New York and praying that
some show now there will "flop," one crosses the trail of many
other wandering troupes that are battering about from town to
town. In remote Johnstown, N. Y., which can only be reached by
trolley and where there is no hotel (but a very fine large
theatre) one finds that Miss Grace George is to be the next
attraction. On the train to Saratoga one rides on the same train
with the Million Dollar Doll, and those who have seen her "paper"
on the billboards in Newburgh or Poughkeepsie keep an attentive
optic open for the lady herself to see how nearly she lives up to
her lithographs. And if the passerby should see a lighted window
in the hotel glimmering at two in the morning, he will probably
aver that there are some of those light-hearted "show people"
carousing over a flagon of Virginia Dare. Little does he suspect
that long after the tranquil thespians have gone to their
well-earned hay, the miserable authors of the trying-out piece
may be vigiling together, trying to dope out a ne