, as effulgent as inverted
chrysanthemums, and led by a black pony with a gold star in her hair,
kicked to the wings and adored the audience. A chain of "Bungel belles"
stretched their thin arms above their heads in a letter O and prinked
about on their toes like bantams in a dust road.

Five trombones, ten violas, twelve violins, a drum and bass-viol
bombardment rose to a high-C climax, with the chorus scrambling loyally
after them like a mountaineer scaling a cliff for an eaglet's nest.

It is the Bay--it is the Bay--it is the Ba-a-ay
Of Love and Bunge-e-e-l--

shouted the seventy-five of them, receding with a grape-vine motion
into the wings.

Enter Cyrus Hinkelstein, mayor and pickle-magnate of Brineytown, on the
Suwanee, in a too large white waistcoat, white-duck comedy spats, and a
pink-canvas bald head.

He institutes an immediate search behind tropical vines and along the
under sides of palm fronds for the forty-dollar juvenile who is pursuing
the Red Widow from the summer hotel, Act One to Act Two, tropical isle
off the Bay of Bungel.

Enter the Red Widow in a black, fish-scale gown that calls out the
stealthy pencil of every Middle West dressmaker in the house and rapid
calculation from the women with a good memory and some fish-scales on a
discarded basque.

The Red Widow, with a poinsettia sprawling like a frantic clutch at her
heart, and her burnished gold head rising with the grace of a gold
flower out of a vase!

Cyrus assumes a swoon of delight, throws out a cue--"The date-trees are
blooming"--the conductor raps his baton twice for their feature duet
entitled, "Oh, Let Me Die on Broadway," and the spot-light focuses.

The house clamors for a fourth encore, but the lights flash on. The
pursuing son, in the face of prolonged applause, white trousers, and a
straw katy, bursts upon the scene with his features in first position
for the denouement.

But the audience clamors on. The son postpones his expression and leans
against a jungle to a fourth encore of the tuneful Thanatopsis.

On the final curtain of the hundredth night the company bowed two
curtain-calls to the capacity house busily struggling into wraps and up
aisles.

The Red Widow, linked between the pickle-magnate and the triumphant son,
flanked by sextets, octets, and regimentals, bowed four times over three
sheaths of American beauties and a high-handled basket of carnations.

Then, almost on the drop of the curtain, the