Alliance, on the lower East
Side--a most worthy institution which ought to have survived. A Miss
Alice M. Herts, who developed and directed it, gave her strength and
health to build up an institution through which the interest of the
children could be diverted from less fortunate amusements. She had
interested a great body of Jewish children in the plays of Shakespeare,
and of more modern dramatists, and these they had performed from time
to time with great success. The admission fee to the performance was ten
cents, and the theater was always crowded with other children--certainly
a better diversion for them than the amusements of the street, though of
course, as a business enterprise, the theater could not pay. It required
patrons. Miss Herts obtained permission to play "The Prince and the
Pauper," and Mark Twain agreed to become a sort of chief patron in using
his influence to bring together an audience who might be willing to
assist financially in this worthy work.

"The Prince and the Pauper" evening turned out a distinguished affair.
On the night of November 19, 1907, the hall of the Educational Alliance
was crowded with such an audience as perhaps never before assembled on
the East Side; the finance and the fashion of New York were there. It
was a gala night for the little East Side performers. Behind the curtain
they whispered to each other that they were to play before queens. The
performance they gave was an astonishing one. So fully did they
enter into the spirit of Tom Canty's rise to royalty that they seemed
absolutely to forget that they were lowly-born children of the Ghetto.
They had become little princesses and lords and maids-in-waiting, and
they moved through their pretty tinsel parts as if all their ornaments
were gems and their raiment cloth of gold. There was no hesitation,
no awkwardness of speech or gesture, and they rose really to sublime
heights in the barn scene where the little Prince is in the hands of the
mob. Never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob
more wonderful than that. These children knew mobs! A mob to them was
a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you
with its realism. Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of
artificiality in it. It was Hogarthian in its bigness.

Both Mark Twain and Miss Herts made brief addresses, and the audience
shouted approval of their words. It seems a pity that such a project as
that must f