ggest
brain I have met with on the stage, but because of his humor and charity
and gentle chivalry and his most romantic mind. One can conceive him as
often, sitting at ease, far back in his chair, cross-legged,
occasionally ringing for another ice, for he was so partial to sweets
that he could never get them sweet enough, and sometimes he mixed two in
the hope that this would make them sweeter.

I hear him telling stories of the stage as only he could tell them,
rising now and roaming the floor as he shows how the lady of the play
receives the declaration, and perhaps forgetting that you are the author
of the play and telling you the whole story of it with superb gesture
and gleaming eyes. Then back again cross-legged to the chair. What an
essay Elia might have made of that night, none of it about the stories
told, all about the man in the chair, the humorous, gentle, roughly
educated, very fine American gentleman in the chair!

J. M. BARRIE.

LONDON, 1915.

_Charles Frohman_

I

A CHILD AMID THE THEATER

One evening, toward the close of the 'sixties, a plump, rosy-cheeked lad
in his eighth year stood enthralled in the gallery of the old Niblo's
Garden down on lower Broadway in New York. Far below him on the stage
"The Black Crook"--the extravaganza that held all New York--unfolded
itself in fascinating glitter and feminine loveliness. Deaf to his
brother's entreaties to leave, and risking a parental scolding and
worse, the boy remained transfixed until the final curtain. When he
reached home he was not in the least disturbed by the uproar his absence
had caused. Quite the contrary. His face beamed, his eyes shone. All he
could say was:

"I have seen a play. It's wonderful!"

The boy was Charles Frohman, and such was his first actual experience in
the theater--the institution that he was to dominate in later years with
far-flung authority.

* * *

To write of the beginnings of his life is to become almost immediately
the historian of some phase of amusement. He came from a family in whom
the love of mimic art was as innate as the desire for sustenance.

About his parents was the glamour of a romance as tender as any he
disclosed to delighted audiences in the world of make-believe. His
father, Henry Frohman, was both idealist and dreamer. Born on the
pleasant countryside that encircles the town of Darmstadt in Germany, he
grew up amid an appreciation of the best in German literature. He wa