F.?"

"No, I am only afraid of the I O U's," was the reply.

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY DANIEL FROHMAN

_CHARLES FROHMAN ON BOARD SHIP_]

In his farewell steamer letter to Dillingham, written as the huge ship
was plowing her way down the bay, he drew a picture of a submarine
attacking a transatlantic liner. The last lines he wrote on the boat
were prophetic of his fate. Ann Murdock had sent him a large steamer
basket in the shape of a ship. The lines to her, brought back by the
ship's pilot, were:

_The little ship you sent is more wonderful
than the big one that takes me away from you._

Like most of his distinguished fellow-voyagers, and they included
Charles Klein, Elbert Hubbard, Justus Miles Forman, and Alfred G.
Vanderbilt, Frohman had frequently traveled on the _Lusitania_. By a
curious coincidence he had once planned to use her sister ship, the
_Mauretania_, for one of his daring innovations. He had a transatlantic
theater in mind. In other words, he proposed to produce whole plays on
shipboard. He took over a small company headed by Marie Doro to try out
the experiment. Early on the voyage Miss Doro succumbed to seasickness
and the project was abandoned.

The last journey of the _Lusitania_ was uneventful until that final
fateful day. Frohman had kept to his cabin during the greater part of
the trip. He was still suffering great pain in his right knee, and
walked the deck with difficulty. Occasionally he appeared in the
smoking-room, and was present at the ship's concert on the night before
the end.

At 2.33 o'clock on the afternoon of May 7th the great vessel rode to her
death. Eight miles off the Head of Kinsale, and within sight of the
Irish coast, she was torpedoed by a German submarine. She sank in half
an hour, with frightful loss of life, including more than a hundred
Americans.

Frohman's hour was at hand, and he met it with the smiling equanimity
and unflinching courage with which he had faced every other crisis in
his life. When the crash came he was on the upper promenade deck. He had
just come from his luncheon and was talking with George Vernon, the
brother-in-law of Rita Jolivet, the actress, who was also on board. They
were now joined by Captain Scott, an Englishman on his way from India to
enlist. When Miss Jolivet reached them Frohman was smoking a cigar and
was calm and apparently undisturbed.

Scott went below to get some life-belts. He returned with only two. He