, that an old lady near us wished to be
taken out, declaring that 'that young female would get her neck broken
next thing.'

"In the last scene where the page (Miss Lulu Dickson) was ordered to
extinguish the torch, the poor girl made frantic efforts, but failing,
walked off with the thing blazing.

"When Paris entered with his page, a youth in a night shirt, that youth
carried in his countenance the fixed determination of putting out his
torch at the right moment or dieing in the attempt. We all saw that.

"Expectancy was worked up to a point of intense interest, so that when at
last the word was given, a puff of wind not only extinguished the torch
but shook the scenery, and made us thankful the young man did wear
pantaloons, as the consequences might have been terrible.

"When Count Paris fell mortally wounded, a tombstone at his side fell over
him in the most convenient and charming manner. The house was so convulsed
with merriment that when poor Juliet was exposed in the tomb she was
greeted with laughter, much to the poor girl's embarrassment. And this is
the sort of entertainment to which we have been treated throughout our
entire season. But then the showman is a success and pays his bills."

The great Eastern cities of America are regarded by an American artist
much in the same light as is the metropolis by a provincial artist at
home. Their approval is supposed to stamp as genuine the verdict of
remoter districts. The success which had attended Mary Anderson in her
journeyings West and South was not to desert her when she presented
herself before the presumably more critical audiences of the East. She
made her Eastern _debut_ at Pittsburg, the Birmingham of America, in the
heat of the Presidential election of 1880, and met with a thoroughly
enthusiastic reception, to proceed thence to Philadelphia, where she
reaped plenty of honor, but very little money. Boston, the Athens of the
New World, was reached at length. When Mary Anderson was taken down by the
manager to see the vast Boston Theater, whose auditorium seats 4000
people, and which Henry Irving declared to be the finest in the world, she
almost fainted with apprehension. She opened here in Evadne, and one
journal predicted that she would take Cushman's place. This part was
followed by Juliet, Meg Merrilies, and her other chief impersonations. On
one day of her engagement the receipts at a matinee and an evening
performance amounted together to the la