ure prominently as the nub, followed, before you
have time to stop laughing, by one about "whip poor Will"
(whippoorwill--get it?). If "Rip Van Winkle" is ever produced again, Ed
Wynn should be cast as Rip. He would eat that line alive.

* * * * *

Ed Wynn, by the way, might do wonders by the opera if he could get the
rights to produce it in his own way. Let Mr. MacKaye's name stay on the
programme, but give Ed Wynn the white card to do as he might see fit
with the book. For instance, one of Mr. MacKaye's characters is named
"Dirck Spuytenduyvil." Let him stand as he is, but give him two cousins,
"Mynheer Yonkers" and "Jan One Hundred and Eighty-third Street." The
three of them could do a comedy tumbling act. There is practically no
end to the features that could be introduced to tone the thing up.

The basic idea of "Rip Van Winkle" would lend itself admirably to
Broadway treatment, for Mr. MacKaye has taken liberties, with the legend
and introduced the topical idea of a Magic Flask, containing home-made
hootch. Hendrick Hudson, the Captain of the Catskill Bowling Team, is
the lucky possessor of the doctor's prescription and formula, and it is
in order to take a trial spin with the brew that Rip first goes up to
the mountain. Here are Hendrick's very words of invitation:

_You'll be right welcome. I will let you taste
A wonder drink we brew aboard the Half Moon.
Whoever drinks the Magic Flask thereof
Forgets all lapse of time
And wanders ever in the fairy season
Of youth and spring.
Come join me in the mountains
At mid of night
And there I promise you the Magic Flask_.

And so at mid of night Rip fell for the promise of wandering "in the
fairy season," as so many have done at the invitation of a man who has
"made a little something at home which you couldn't tell from the real
stuff." Rip got out of it easily. He simply went to sleep for twenty
years. You ought to see a man I know.

There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading
of "Rip Van Winkle" may be given without first getting the author's
permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.

XXXIX

LITERARY LOST AND FOUND DEPARTMENT

With Scant Apology to the Book Section of the _New York Times_.

"OLD BLACK TILLIE"

H.G.L.--When I was a little girl, my nurse, used to recite a poem
something like the following (as near as I can remember). I wonder i