hought on awaking the next morning was one of dismay, on
recalling the destruction of the little "P.H.C."--that being the actors
contraction of Mr. Daly's somewhat grandiloquent "Parlor Home of Comedy."
My grief over the burning of the pretty toy theatre was very real, and I
would have been an astonished young woman had anyone prophesied that for
me, personally, the disaster was to prove a piece of unqualified good
luck.

And, by the way, that expression "good luck" reminds me of one of the
incidents of the fire. That morning, when the firemen went to the ruins
to examine into the state of the standing front wall, they looked upward,
and there, all alone, on the burned and blackened space, smiling down in
friendly fashion upon them, was the picture of Clara Morris--a bit
charred as to frame and smoky as to glass, but the photograph (one taken
by Kurtz), absolutely uninjured, being the one and only thing saved from
the ruins. The firemen very naturally wanted it for their engine-house,
and Mr. Daly said that for it many were claiming, pleading, demanding,
bartering--but all in vain. His superstition was aroused. Not for
anything in the world, he cried, would he part from his "luck," as he
ever after called the rescued picture. So there again appeared the malice
of inanimate things, for how else could one account for the plunging of
that line, the entire length of the staircase, of splendidly framed
pictures of loveliness, into the fiery depths, while the plain and
unimportant one kept its place in calm security?

Mr. Daly had a very expensive company on his hands. He had amazed other
managers by his "corner" on leading men. With three already in his
company he had not hesitated to draw on Boston for Harry Crisp, and on
Philadelphia for Mr. Louis James; and when he added such names as George
Clark, Daniel Harkins, George DeVere, James Lewis, William Lemoyne,
William Davidge, A. Whiting, Owen Fawcett, George Parkes, F. Burnett, H.
Bascombe, J. Beekman, Charles Fisher, George Gilbert, etc., one can
readily understand that the salary of the men alone must have made quite
an item in the week's expenses, and added to the sharp necessity of
getting us to work as quickly as possible. And in actual truth the ruins
of the little theatre were not yet cold when Mr. Daly had, by wire,
secured a week for us, divided between Syracuse and Albany, and we were
scrambling dresses together and buying new toilet articles--rouge,
powders, an