e a
line spread of canvas in the balcony. The audience, ever quick to catch
on to a joke, seeing each man glance upward, followed suit, spied the
enormous handkerchief held high in the left hand, and realizing the
situation, burst into hilarious laughter. Uselessly I pleaded; at every
possible opportunity the white handkerchief appeared in some left hand,
while the stage manager vainly wondered why the audience laughed in such
unseemly places that night.

The next day that young person, whom I had treated as a common "masher,"
heaped a whole shovelful of hot, hot coals upon my guilty head by
writing me a letter less carefully dotted and crossed, somewhat more
confused in metaphor than before, but beginning with: "I am afraid you
are cruel. I think you must have betrayed me to your mates, for I do not
remember that they did such things before last night with their
handkerchiefs."

Then, after telling me his home address, his business, and his exact
standing socially, he laid these specially large hot coals carefully
upon my brow, "So, though you make a laughing-stock of me, now don't
think I shall be mad about it; but remember if any trouble or sickness
comes to you, no matter how far from now, if you will just write me one
word, I'll help you to my plumb last cent," and truly Mr. Fix left me
ashamed and sorry.

He had suffered for his name, which I believed to be an assumed one.
Poor young man, I offer an apology to his memory.

One scamp wrote so brazenly, so persistently, demanding answers to be
sent to a certain prominent club, that I one day laid the letters before
Mr. Daly, and he advertised in the theatre programme that "if Mr.
B.M.B., of such a club, would call at the box office, he would receive
not the answer he expected, but the one he deserved," and Mr. Daly was
highly delighted when he heard that B.M.B., who was a "masher" _par
excellence_, had been literally chaffed out of the club rooms.

Those creatures that, like poisonous toadstools, spring up at street
corners to the torment of women, should be taken in hand by the police,
since they encumber the streets and are a menace and a mortification to
female citizens. Let some brazen woman take the place of one of these
street "mashers," and proceed to ogle passers-by, and see how quickly
the police would gather her in.

But so far as the stage "masher" is concerned, dear and anxious mamma,
auntie, or sister, don't worry about the safety of your actress