ard Labrador. But, I thought, I could never know her quite
so well again as I had this day; she would not loiter with me quite so
familiarly, with her dear, friendly squeeze of my fingers as the
childish voices drifted with the brook song down the cove. I had kept
tryst with Spring at Thumping Dick, for once the favored of all her
myriad lovers.

[Illustration]

_The Passing of the Stage Sundial_

It has been many years since I have seen a sundial on the stage. There
was a time when the stage could not get along without them; but styles
have changed. "Iram indeed has gone with all his rose," and Eddie
Sothern, best beloved of romantic actors in your generation and mine,
has written his theatrical memoires, which is the player's method of
saying farewell. _The Melancholy Tale of Me_, he calls them, perhaps
because they are not in the least melancholy--a good and sufficient
reason. Yet Mr. Sothern strangely neglects the subject of sundials in
his book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in the
golden Nineties!--the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties,
that _fin-de-siecle_ decade when Max Nordau thundered that we were
going to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we were
headed not alone for a new heaven, but what is much more important, a
new earth.

My school and college days fell entirely in the Nineties, or almost
entirely, for I finally emerged with a sheepskin written in Latin I
could no longer translate, in June, 1900. I saw my first modern
realistic play in 1893, when I was a little junior middler at Phillips
Andover. It was _Shore Acres_, and I have not yet forgotten, after a
quarter of a century, the thrill of that revelation. It was almost as
if my grandfather's kitchen had been put upon the stage, and with
Herne himself to play the leading role, to blow on the frosty pane
that he could peer into the night, to bank the fires, tip the stove
lids, lock the door, and climb slowly up to bed while the old kitchen,
in semi-darkness, seemed like a closing benediction before the
downrush of the final curtain, I caught the poetry of the commonplace,
I had my first unconscious lesson in literary and dramatic fidelity.
And I ended my college days, a much more sophisticated person,
championing Pinero and Jones, rushing eagerly to special performances
of Ibsen, and ardently admiring the plays of G. B. Shaw, two of which,
_Arm