olitics or need, gradually lost the company every one of these actors
that took part in its first performances in 1902. There were
comparatively few changes, though, until 1904, the year in which Miss
Horniman, "a generous English friend," took for them the old Mechanic
Institute Theatre and, rebuilding it in part, turned it over to the
Irish National Dramatic Company for six years. Up to this time the
actors had received no pay, giving their services for love of country
and of art, but with the more frequent performances and their attendant
rehearsals it became necessary to take a large part of the time of the
leading men and women, and then, of course, they had to be paid. Before
the opening of the Abbey Theatre, three of the chief actors, Miss Quinn
and Mr. Digges and Mr. Kelly, came to this country to appear in Irish
plays in the Irish Section of the St. Louis Fair. The public that
gathered in St. Louis was not prepared for the new drama, being more
used to the musical play of the type Mr. Olcott has made familiar in
America, or to the Bowery Irishman of the Harrigan plays, or to the
gross caricatures, Galwayed and ape-accoutred, of the before-curtain
interlude of the variety show. As a result the former National Players
protested against the policy of the Irish Section and returned to New
York. Miss Walker was the principal actress of the company after Miss
Quinn's departure to America, and upon Miss Walker's withdrawal in 1905
the burden of the chief women's roles fell upon Miss Allgood.

Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay were still the leading men of the
company, creating the principal characters of all the plays of Synge and
of those of Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory that were produced before 1908.
Early in this year, as I have said, Mr. and Mrs. W.G. Fay and Mr. F.J.
Fay left the company, and, coming to America in the spring, played "The
Rising of the Moon" and "A Pot of Broth" in New York. They made,
unfortunately, no great success in their appearances, as their plays
were not presented in bills devoted solely to Irish plays, but as
curtain-raisers to the usual conventional farce. Almost all the actors
whom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually found
their way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them made
successes there comparable in any degree to their successes in
folk-drama or in plays out of old Irish legend. Nor can it be said that
actors trained in the dominant forms of pres