l it's so. You watch 'em. The style in wives is changin'. Actresses
is goin' out an' the 'poor but honest workin' goil' is comin' in. One of
our salesladies has a book about it. "The Bowery Bride" its name is. All
about a shop goil what married a rich fellow and used to come back to
the store and take her old friends carriage ridin'. If Rosie Rosenbaum
tries it on me, I'll break her face. If she comes round me," cried the
Prince's fellow student: "with carriages and a benevolent smile, I'll
claw the smile off of her if I have to take the skin with it!"

When Horatio and Hamlet left her, she wandered disconsolate, down to the
river. But no willow grows aslant that brook, no flowers were there with
which to weave fantastic garlands.

"I've gone crazy all right," said poor Ophelia as she watched the lights
of the great bridge, "but I don't drown myself until Scene VII. And I'm
goin' up to his house to-morrow night to learn to act crazy. I guess I
don't need much learning."

* * * * *

The performance of Hamlet by the Lady Hyacinths is still remembered by
those who saw it as the most bewildering entertainment of their
theatrical experience. The play had been cut down to its absolute
essentials and the players, though drilled and coached in their lines
and business, had been left quite free in the matters of interpretation
and accent. The result was so unique that the daily press fell upon it
with whoops of joy and published portraits of and interviews with the
leading characters. People who had thought that only ferries and docks
lay south of Twenty-third Street penetrated to the heart of the great
East Side and went home again full of an altruism which lasted three
days. And on the last night of the "run" of three nights, Jack Burgess
brought Albert Marsden to witness it. Other spectators had always
emerged dumb or inarticulate from the ordeal but the great actor was not
one of them. He was blusterous and garrulous and, to Burgess' amazement,
not at all amused.

"Who is that girl who played Ophelia? Is she an East Side working girl
or one of the mission people?"

"She's a shop-girl," answered Burgess. "There's no good in your asking
me to introduce you to her for I won't. That's been one of our rules
from the beginning. We don't want the children to be upset and
patronized."

"Who taught her to act?"

"Well, I coached them all as you know, but she never seemed to require
any special