in the adjoining room objected to my practicing. I reached Cincinnati just in time for the concert, owing to another late train, to find that Van der Stucken had cut his finger so badly he could not play the piano at all. My talented accompanist, Mr. Harold Smith, with no more chance than I to study these beautiful songs, was obliged with me to read them at sight before a crowded audience. If my effort was not a success, it was equally far from failure.

Later in the season I found myself in Texas, stranded at a railway junction on the prairie with the train several hours late. The night was cold and inside that little shack of a station was a stove almost red hot, around it as motley a crew of men, women, and children as one could well see - indeed I could scarcely see them for the tobacco smoke; but even through that an overwhelming evidence of their presence came to my nostrils. Cowboys, negroes, Indians, Chinese, European peasants, dogs, cats, and babies were too much for me, and rather than brave such terrors I faced the cool night air outside and went to bed at five o'clock in the morning when my express train came in. I reached Galveston and had several hours' rest before singing in the evening, when the pedals came off the piano in the middle of the performance and the rest of the concert was continued under difficulties. Such is the life of an artist.

CHAPTER XXXVII

SCULPTOR AND STAGE

Life is a stage, so play

The comic way;

Full soon the skies will bring

Some tragic thing.

- After the Greek.

Two men of the first importance in their respective arts were to make the world the poorer by their leaving it during these days, and both were my friends: the sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens and the actor Joseph Jefferson. I saw them often at The Players, and though I have recollections of them personally and artistically that nothing will take from me, what impresses me most in my memories of them is an almost tragic coincidence, whereby their priceless possessions were destroyed by fire.

As I sat down to breakfast one morning at the club mentioned, Mr. Saint Gaudens quietly handed me a telegram from his wife which had just come to him, saying that his studio in the country had burned down in the night with all its precious contents. Understanding what such a loss meant to him, I expressed my sympathy, to which he replied without a show of feeling:

"My friend, I have learned to take things as they come in this life and I have no regrets for the destruction of what I myself have brought into being; almost everything of my own there was only a reproduction of what exists elsewhere. What I mind most is the loss

of the gleanings of a lifetime, the letters of celebrated personages the world over, gifts of drawings and sketches, bronzes, marbles, stained glass, none of which can ever be reproduced. But we have to take things as we find them. I am sorry that the workman my wife was good enough to allow to sleep in the barn should have chosen to light his pipe when the wind was blowing toward the studio. Won't you have some peaches?" With this he went on with his breakfast, quoting as he did so the old saying, "It's no use crying over spilt milk."

The loss of Mr. Jefferson's treasures did not occur during his lifetime, but the destruction is none the less lamentable. In my enthusiasm over the cause of the Art Theatre I had thought how fine it would be if in its foyer there were a collection of portrait busts and paintings of the shining lights of the American stage. When the New Theatre came into being I obtained promises of such mementos from several persons, among them the widow of Joseph Jefferson, who died in the spring of 1905. Not long after I obtained from the family a promise of a portrait bust made in Rome by the American sculptor, Hiram Powers. Time passed, the New Theatre was completed, and I spoke to William Jefferson about the gift promised by his mother, when with great regret he told me that, shortly before, the building in which his father's library and all the other relics of his artistic life had been temporarily stored was burned to the ground. What a loss to the history of the stage of the United States!

Mr. Jefferson was an ardent lover of the fine arts and had painted many canvases large and small, by which, though few admired them, he himself set great store. One of his intimate friends was President Grover Cleveland, whom Mr. Jefferson used frequently to visit at his country place on Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts. Mr. Cleveland placed at the actor's disposal an ancient windmill on the estate as a studio, and there the good old player used to finish sketches made while visiting his host. To the windmill Mr. Cleveland would come and chat with Jefferson as he worked, and as the actor lovingly touched up some of his sketches one day, talking to his friend Grover the while, he said after a thoughtful silence, "Mr. President, though I have been an actor all my life I think that when I die I shall go down to fame as a painter." Dear, simple soul that he was, he little knew that the moment he had shuffled off this mortal coil, every landscape of his on the walls of The Players, of which he had been president since Edwin Booth's death, would be at once removed by the art committee.

I was very fond of Richard Mansfield, the actor, and found him to be the most courteous and considerate of men. I was ready to sing at his musicales, a fact which immediately put him in good humor, if he happened to be upset, and which invariably brought out in him his best qualities as an entertainer. He was an excellent pianist, possessed a beautiful singing voice, and his quaintness and originality in extemporization were remarkable. I have known Mansfield toward the close of one of his extraordinary evenings to devise hastily the general plot of a short operatic domestic tragedy, inform two or three others, and set us all to work immediately on an extemporaneous performance. Walter Damrosch would perhaps preside at the piano, playing an unholy combination of old Italian opera, Wagnerian music-drama, "Ta-rara-boom-de-ay," and "Danny Deever," while Marguerite Hall as the heroine, I as the irate parent, and Mansfield as the heavy villain would sing in faked Italian lingo, clad the while in antique armor and mediæval raiment from our host's wardrobe.

Mansfield adored his wife, and yet stories of cruelty to her became current in the daily papers. In reality there was never a kinder man in his family circle or a more genial host, though his penchant for practical joking sometimes led him to extremes of behavior. For instance, Mansfield at one of his Sunday night dinner parties, a formal occasion attended by people of distinction in social, literary, and artistic life, ordered his butler to remove every course as it came on the table before his guests had an opportunity to taste the food which, though cooked to perfection by a French chef, the fantastic Richard would declare unfit to eat. The appetite of no one present was satisfied by more than nibbles at bread, until the close of what should have been the meal, when our host permitted ices, fruits, and coffee to be served. Then the amazed disappointment of those present was assuaged by a most remarkable evening's entertainment furnished by the brilliant conversation of our eminent host. We were moved to uncontrollable laughter by his wit and to tears by his story of the care taken of him by Madame Edna Hall in Boston, when as a youth his own mother had turned him off, and the evening ended with beautiful music.

I was present in Chicago at one of his early performances of " Julius Cæsar." Mansfield had confided to me that it was his original intention to double the parts of Cæsar and Brutus. I was astonished to find that he permitted Arthur Forest, who gave a fine performance of Mark Antony, to take every curtain call of the evening, he himself taking not one throughout the season.