an when he was a poor boy staring wistfully at portals out of
which he was kept by the want of a few pence. I think when he first saw
a theater he clapped his hand to his heart, and certainly he was true
to his first love. Up to the end it was still the same treat to him to
go in; he still thrilled when the band struck up, as if that boy had
hold of his hand.

* * *

In a sense he had no illusions about the theater, knew its tawdriness as
he knew the nails on his stages (he is said to have known every one). He
would watch the performance of a play in some language of which he did
not know a word and at the end tell you not only the whole story, but
what the characters had been saying to one another; indeed, he could
usually tell what was to happen in any act as soon as he saw the
arrangement of the furniture. But this did not make him _blase_--a
strange word, indeed, to apply to one who seemed to be born afresh each
morning. It was not so much that all the world was a stage to him as
that his stage was a world, a world of the "artistic temperament"--that
is to say, a very childish world of which he was occasionally the stern
but usually indulgent father.

His innumerable companies were as children to him; he chided them as
children, soothed them, forgave them, and certainly loved them as
children. He exulted in those who became great names in that world and
gave them beautiful toys to play with; but, great as was their devotion
to him, it is not they who will miss him most, but rather the far
greater number who never "made a hit," but set off like the rest to do
it and fell by the way. He was of so sympathetic a nature, he understood
so well the dismalness to them of being "failures," that he saw them as
children with their knuckles to their eyes, and then he sat back
cross-legged on his chair with his knuckles, as it were, to his eyes,
and life had lost its flavor for him until he invented a scheme for
giving them another chance.

* * *

Authors of to-day sometimes discuss with one another what great writer
of the past they would like most to spend an evening with if the shades
were willing to respond, and I believe (and hope) that the choice most
often falls on Johnson or Charles Lamb. Lamb was fond of the theater,
and I think, of all those connected with it that I have known, Mr.
Frohman is the one with whom he would most have liked to spend an
evening. Not because of Mr. Frohman's ability, though he had the bi