a phenomenal cast,
it might catch on for a brief spell. Of course, the cast would be an
easy enough matter to get, as casts go. Stars nowadays, such as they
are--Heaven save the mark!--are more plentiful than stock. But let them
rest at that. I have known the time when there were as many as fifty
_Uncle Tommers_ on the road--all doing well, if not better. There were
no theatrical syndicates in those times to limit the enterprise and
energy of the aspiring though poor and ambitious manager. 'Uncle Tom'
audiences were different from those who attended other theatrical snaps.
There was so much of the religious faking mixed in with the old piece
that it caught the Sunday-go-to-meeting crowd and drew them as a
molasses barrel will draw flies. That class of people reasoned that
'Uncle Tom' wasn't a real theatre show--it was a moral show. What fools
we mortals be? Didn't some poor play actor say that, or did I think it
out myself? Well, no matter now. But don't the newspapers tell us that
there was a big bunch of people in New York City at one time who used to
flock to Barnum's Museum, which stood opposite St. Paul's Church, on
Broadway, and how they'd scoop in the show there simply because old
Barnum called his theatre a lecture-room. It was the lecture-room racket
that caught them. The old showman was a cute one--slick as they made
'em. When the museum burned down, didn't he go to work and sell the hole
in the ground the fire made to James Gordon Bennett, the elder, founder
of _The Herald_, and got the best of the famous editor in the sale into
the bargain. Ah, those were the good old times!"

"The palmy days of the drama, I suppose," interjected Handy.

"Palmy fiddlesticks!" laughingly chimed in one of the group.

"Oh, joke as you may, boys, but I am giving you the straight goods,"
continued the Little 'Un, handing out a little bit of reminiscent news
of days gone by that will never be duplicated.

"He's dead right. Speakin' of those days," added Smith, "I remember well
the times gone by in the old Bowery Theatre on certain gay and festive
occasions to have seen as many as seventeen glasses of good old
Monongahela whisky set up in the green-room and not a man took water
when called upon to do his duty. They have no green-rooms any more. But
let me tell you that's where the managers of the present day take their
cues from, for those after-performance first-night stage suppers that
are frequently given for the entertainme