ich was the name of the Civil War
play.

"Look here, Jake!" exclaimed Mr. Hadley, "is this supposed to be a
desperate, bloody battle, or a game of tennis?"

"Why, a battle scene, of course, Mr. Hadley!"

"Well, I'm glad to know it! From the way most of your people just
rehearsed it, I thought I might be in the wrong box, and looking at a
college football game. But no, I wrong the college game! That would be
more strenuous than this battle scene, at least as far as I've watched
it. Can't you get a little more life into your people?"

"I'll try, Mr. Hadley," answered the manager, as the producer walked
over to the two boys who stood near their cameras waiting for the word
to be given, when they would begin grinding out the long reels of
celluloid film.

"This is positively the worst production I've ever been in!" complained
Mr. Hadley to Blake. "Did you ever see such a farce as when the
Confederates were hidden in the orchard and the Unionists stormed over
the stone wall? You'd think they were a lot of boys going after apples.
Bah! It makes me weary!"

"It isn't very realistic," admitted Blake.

"Mr. Ringold's talking to them now like a Dutch uncle," observed Joe, as
he idly swung the crank of his camera, the machine not being in gear.

"Well, I hope it does some good," observed the producer. "If it isn't
better pretty soon, I'll let all these extra men go and hire others
myself. I want that battle scene to look halfway real, at least."

"It'll be a failure, I know it will," observed a melancholy-looking man
who strolled up at this juncture. "I saw a black cat as I came from my
room this morning, and that's always a sign of bad luck."

"Oh, leave it to you to find something wrong!" exploded Mr. Hadley.
"Can't you look on the cheerful side once in a while, C. C.?" he asked,
forgetting that he, himself, had been prophetic of failure but a few
moments before.

"Humph!" murmured C. C., otherwise Christopher Cutler Piper, a comedian
by profession and a gloom-producer by choice, "you might have known
those fellows couldn't act after you'd had one look at 'em," and he
motioned to the mobs of extra men, part of whom formed the Confederate
and the other half the Union armies. "There isn't a man among them who
has ever played Macbeth."

"If they had, and they let it affect them as it does you, I'd fire them
on the spot!" laughed Mr. Hadley; and at this, his first sign of mirth
that day, Blake, Joe and some of the oth