, took a written list from his pocket and laid it on the
table.

It goes without saying that the select turns which they were about to
discuss had long been engaged for Harrasford's different music-halls, some
of them two or three years ahead, as often happens in the case of the
great bill-toppers, and the question was to choose among the best, so as
to insure the triumph of the opening night. For Harrasford, who had as yet
appointed no one as manager or stage-manager, the thing was to settle a
program which would discourage any attempt at competition, to have none
appearing except stars, without counting those whom he held in reserve for
the following month, before distributing them over his variety-theaters in
England, or, later, to any part of Europe, in the "Great Powers Tour"
which he proposed to create and of which the Astrarium would be a sort of
"commodore" music-hall, or headquarters. Jimmy only gave his opinion,
after which Harrasford would decide.

Harrasford's dream was a model music-hall, something, in its own way, like
the Grand Opera in Paris: a palatial edifice, in a new style of
architecture, with friezes displaying bodies in contortion, caryatids,
cast from life, supporting the springers of the arches, mixed groups of
loins and chests with swelling muscles, under the electric lights, and, in
the lobbies, a lavish display of African onyx, Scotch granite and Russian
porphyry. The crowd would pass in between Venus and Apollo, holding
flowers and lights; and there would be music everywhere; gaiety, noise,
red and gold everywhere; all cares would be laid aside and forgotten on
entering; it would be a hall containing every modern convenience, like the
Iroquois at Buffalo or a 'Frisco sky-scraper: newspapers, cafe, bars,
smoking-room, barbers' saloon, telegraph-office, telephone-office,
messenger-boys, ticket-office, private rooms in which phonographs would
shout out the latest news illustrated with telesteriography, from eight
o'clock till midnight. The idea was to create, thirty years ahead of its
time, the great popular music-hall, with its ball-rooms, as at Blackpool,
its side-shows, a palm-garden, a roof-garden; to draw to the theater those
who, on getting up from dinner, go to the cafe and stay there; to give
them an atmosphere of mirth and jollity, of comforting lights, a sort of
night forum, of People's Palace, with, in the middle, in the sumptuous
hall, facing the furnace that was the stage, a long t