-creators of innocent pleasure.

Long years before this was penned, and while yet my locks were
innocent of the whiteness that now typifies my years, I was closely
associated with the family of Wayburn. I was a man in Chicago when Ned
Wayburn was a boy in the same city, starting on what was destined to
become a truly remarkable career.

I know Ned Wayburn well. He is a king and a thoroughbred, as man or as
manager, and to know him is to esteem him.

[Illustration: CINDERELLA]

His fame is peculiar in that it is based so largely on the success of
other people--the actors and dancers whom he has discovered or
directed and so helped to become stars of the first magnitude. To name
them by hundreds is easy; to number all who are approaching stardom or
who, now well placed on the professional stage, have materially
profited by his aid and instruction, will go into the thousands.
Surely such a record of achievement is ample cause for pride.

Ned Wayburn possesses an almost uncanny faculty of discerning latent
talent in the line of his profession. You may not know one dance step
from another, yet his discerning eye will detect a possibility for you
in some branch of the dancing art that results will later prove as
correct as they are surprising to yourself.

I have heard him tell of Evelyn Law, that when she first came to the
studio she exhibited a tap and step dance as her specialty.

"This type of dancing was totally unsuited to her," said Ned, "and I
told her so. And I also told her what her 'line' was. She took my
advice, and today she leads the world in that type of dancing, and her
salary has four figures in it every week."

The man who can do that is a genius, and Ned Wayburn has done it many,
many times.

There is one outstanding fact in his entire career as producer of
shows and director of the education of his pupils in his dancing
studios: He insists that everything and everybody about him shall be
"the best." His studios are fitted up "the best," regardless of cost.
Sixty thousand dollars he paid for the fittings and furnishings of the
two floors contained in his perfect establishment for teaching dancing
at Columbus Circle, Broadway and Sixtieth Street, New York. His
instructing staff must be "the best." His pupils must be "the best." I
mean by that, not that the pupils are so qualified when they enter,
but that when they are ready to graduate from his institution into the
professional life of the stage,