ed that I was
having a time. Well, to continue about our show. Wilbur says it will
never go, because they only got block stands, and an agent ain't got no
show without at least one kind of a litho. Wilbur said it hurt the
artistic instinct of a billposter in these hick towns to put up all
block stands, and you generally have to slip them a little something to
be sure that they burn up all the extra stuff, so that the manager of
the company wouldn't find it should he go snooping around the bill room
when the show gets in town. He says if they get a good litho of a
killing or a chorus they will go out of the way to stick them up just
for art's sake. Wilbur is going to give me a suit case full of hard
tickets to the Friar Festival, and told me to mace every John I came
across on the road for as many as he would stand for. He said the more I
sent in the more he would know I loved him. Wilbur is so romantic!

"This new comedian we got with the show is pretty good, but of course I
can see defects. And the new prima donna is real nice. She asked me into
her dressing-room the other afternoon and slipped me a little idea
encourager that she had in a flask. But the way she is in love with the
tenor, honest, it's sickening to me. She watches him from the time he
comes in the theatre until the time he leaves, and then calls him up on
the 'phone at his home.

"The other day when he asked one of the girls to tie the ribbon in his
cuff she got so jealous that I thought she was going to give the poor
kid a lam on the lamp. What she can see in that tenor is beyond me. What
anybody can see in a tenor has got me guessing, for that matter. Wilbur
says that's just the way with temperamental people, and he lost a job
once just because he forgot to land pictures in the Sunday editions of
all the newspapers in town of the manager's own particular guiding star,
but planted a bunch of her dearest friend instead. He says there's no
pleasing them, and the only way to have peace and harmony around the
whole show shop is to print flashlights of the entire company. And even
that looks like blazes, for the editor will always reduce an
eight-column flashlight to a two-column cut, no matter how many drinks
you buy him.

"He says he saw a murder once--was the only witness, in fact--and he
took it on the run to a newspaper office and offered to trade a Charles
Sommerville to the editor for a reading notice about the show, and the
editor told him that t