seless as a rusty nail. Hotel life in America is now the perfection of
comfort. Hotels as good as the Savoy, the Ritz, the Carlton, and
Claridge's can be counted by the dozen in New York, and are to be found
in all the principal cities.

I liked the travelling, but then we travelled in a very princely
fashion. The Lyceum Company and baggage occupied eight cars, and Henry's
private parlour-car was lovely. The only thing that we found was better
understood in England, so far as railway travelling is concerned, was
_privacy_. You may have a _private_ car, but all the conductors on the
train, and there is one to each car, can walk through it. So can any
official, baggage-man, or newsboy who has the mind!

There were, of course, people ready to say that the Americans did not
like Henry Irving as an actor, and that they only accepted him as a
manager--that he triumphed in New York, as he had done in London,
through his lavish spectacular effects. This is all moonshine. Henry
made his first appearance in "The Bells," his second in "Charles I," his
third in "Louis XI." By that time he had conquered, and without the aid
of anything at all notable in the mounting of the plays. It was not
until we did "The Merchant of Venice" that he gave the Americans
anything of a "production."

My first appearance in America in Shakespeare was as Portia, and I could
not help feeling pleased by my success. A few weeks later I played
Ophelia at Philadelphia. It is in Shakespeare that I have been best
liked in America, and I consider that Beatrice was the part about which
they were most enthusiastic.

During our first tour we visited in succession New York, Philadelphia,
Boston, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit,
and Toronto. To most of these places we paid return visits. I think it
was in Chicago that a reporter approached Henry Irving with the
question: "To what do you attribute your success, Mr. Irving?"

"To my acting," was the simple reply.

We never had poor houses except in Baltimore and St. Louis. Our journey
to Baltimore was made in a blizzard. They were clearing the snow before
us all the way from New Jersey, and we took forty-two hours to reach
Baltimore. The bells of trains before us and behind us sounded very
alarming. We opened in Baltimore on Christmas Day. The audience was
wretchedly small, but the poor things who were there had left their warm
firesides to drive or tramp through the slush of meltin