play a little curtain-raiser of about two-months' duration and then the
real play occupies the rest of the year. It will be all one to the
American visitors, however, who enjoy the novelty, so that they are
allowed to quit when they like. And there is no objection to that from
the polite Chinamen in charge of the Jackson Park theater.

The Turkish theater is across the way and farther east than the Chinese.
It is back from the beaten path and you might miss it--if you were deaf.
Having ears to hear you will be apprised of its whereabouts at forty
rods distance by the orchestra, which sits on the front steps and
discourses horrors on a sort of flageolet and a bass drum. The orchestra
plays only one tune and it plays that hard. When a respectable house has
been gathered by these out-of-door allurements the curtain rises on a
Turkish play. It is a sweet pastoral of a youth who is lovesick and
cannot be cured by the doctor, by the soothsayer--by any one except his
love, who comes in time, and there is a wedding.

When this play was ended, Fanny decided that she had seen enough of
foreign theaters and declined to go further.

A Boston girl in spectacles sat near her through the Turkish play. She
told Fanny that she and her mother had been venturesome enough to visit
the other plays, and they sincerely regretted it. She found a mongrel
horde of Turks, Arabs, Europeans, blacks, Greeks--everything applauding
an interminable song, whose filthy motif it needs no knowledge of Arabic
to discover. The singer was an Algerian woman, good enough looking,
after the pasty style of oriental beauties, young, agile and mistress of
the curious, droning guttural melody which constitutes oriental music.
She plays her part with complete abandon, probably because she knows no
better, and her audience applauds her wildly for the same reasons. The
Boston girl said she had seen these same girls, or their professional
sisters, in the Algerian theater. But their performance had been
modified to suit the western taste. They sing and dance, but their songs
and dances are nothing more dangerous than a languorous drone. But there
are also some funny parts, according to the Algerian idea. They are
played by a jet black Somauli woman who joins in the dance and a jet
black Somauli boy in the orchestra who has a face of India rubber and a
gift for "facial contortion" that would make the fortune of an American
minstrel.

[Illustration: "FACIAL CONTORTION