You have saved Santa Claus, and all the little children in the world will be grateful to you; but we were not going to kill him. Oh no, we are not so hard-hearted; we were just going to take him prisoner for a while. Trot along home now. Your soldier friend is going with you to take you safely back."" A couple of weeks later, on the day before Christmas, the tall soldier came to the house again. He was driving, and from his cart he took a large box. On the cover was written. "Santa Claus is in a great hurry this year, so he left this with the Yankee captain, and asked him to forward it to Ruth and Teddy." So the children had a grand Christmas, and even the marvellous things that came out of the box did not make them neglect mammy's candy. 66 "Dey's de won'erfulest chillun!" said mammy. What deir pa gwine say when he gits dat letter what Miss Sallie a-writin' ter him? Spec he eyes 'll open when he reads 'bout dem babies a-runnin' off ter der Yanks. Dat cap'n ain't no pore w'ite trash, suah's yer bawn." Long afterward, when the little brother and sister were grown up, and the questions which had caused the war were settled, and the North and South were at peace and friends again, Ruth and Teddy met their friend the captain, and had a good laugh, mixed with a few tears, as they recalled their first encounter with him. THE East Side is scarcely the place in heed paid to the shows and the gayeties of life. We have heard of the terrors of the tenements, and of sweat-shops where workman and sweater alike risk body and soul for a few pieces of silver, whole families sewing day and night amid squalor and disease; but the reports of organized charity have neglected to remind us that the people who support the theatres of the Bowery get as much fun of their sort out of life as most of us. You may pity the people of the East Side, if you must, ten hours a day, but when the arc-lights gleam beneath the tracks of the elevated, if you are honest you will envy them. To any one who cares for the stage and for the art of the player in America, the theatres of the lower Bowery are of special interest. Once the haunt of Mose, the Bowery boy, and Lise, his "steady," they are now the homes of foreign actors, who will give you a good time in almost any language. And whereas our plays in English are apt to be either imported or stupid, and are often both, many of these foreign plays are written in New York, and sure sign of a genuine artistic impulse-they treat the life and the history of the people who swarm to see them. They are crude and often absurd enough, but when the curtain rings down, a candid observer will admit that the artistic spirit is more vital and spontaneous in them than in the plays of the most prosperous uptown theatres. The Americans who are familiar with the Teatro Italiano might almost be counted on one's fingers. The theatre is closed now, and the company is disbanded; but and very intimate interest that still keeps its memory warm. This was due in the first place, I think, to the Italians we met. They were bootblacks, and banana-venders, East-Side barbers, and ex-members of Colonel Waring's Street-cleaning Brigade. In some theatres the people you sit next are reserved, and conscious of distinctions, but these men were more truly in sympathy with life. They would speak to you on the slightest pretext, or on none, and would relate all that was happening on the stage, which was useful of them, for the plays were for the most part in popular dialect. The only visitor I ever knew to be neglected was a lady who carried a bottle of smellingsalts. The reproach of this was scarcely obvious, but it was not as the Romans do. In the end we came to think very well of the Italian plays and actors; and if we thought unduly well of them it must have been because, in some unconscious fashion, our neighbors imparted a measure of the grace and ease with which they succeeded in having a good time. If They were for the most part men. this fact had any special significance I was never quite sure what it was; yet it is certain that the arts in their more primitive stages have always been masculine, and one can find fair warrant for saying that when women have come in for a share, they have lost primal force. It is also true, no doubt, that in Italian communities women are apt to be mothers at an early age: babies are sad impediments to many kinds of gayeties and shows. Yet there was always a sprink ling of women, and no audience I ever and if the actors stumbled over their saw was without a baby or two. They lines, or over the crude entrances and were good babies, and never made the exits of the scenery, he laughed softly least disturbance. While they were too, but with what a difference! When awake, they looked at the lights and the it came to really stirring passages, everybrilliant people on the stage with those body made a row, and then on the inmarvelling eyes we would all give so stant everybody hissed himself quiet much to have back again; and when the again, even though this took several tired little head toppled over, as it soon seconds, while the actors complacently did, its mite of an owner was passed from waited. one to another of a party, so that no one was very much put out. If a baby grew peevish, it was sure to be for hunger, and the simplest thing in the world was to nurse it quiet again. There are so many more troublesome things in the world than babies, even when you have the full Italian complement. Or if you don't quite feel so, it is still the part of philosophy to recognize that life could not be without them. Between the acts trays of penny candies were passed round, the brilliant colors of which were alone worth the price, and highly charged soft drinks, equal in glamour, which even the women drank out of the bottles. They were not half bad-that is, if one was well resolved not to strain at a microbe in swallowing the camel. The orchestra was scarcely less a feature than the players. In the American theatres on the Bowery the concord of sweet sounds is to be explained only on the assumption that the conscientious band plays the fly-specks as well as the notes. Even if they did not do this, they would still be jeered at. But the Italiau audiences hung on every bar, whether it was Faust or a patriotic air; and when the tunes one has a right to were over, they implored for more. "Let's have another, now! Come on, we'll give you a hand, all right!" And. they held forth the bribe of a pair of eager palms. When the curtain was up, they gave way to the full gamut of human emotions. In the American theatres of the East Side the audiences shout and whistle their appreciation; but a handful of Italians can give them cards and spades in the matter of mere noise; and it has, besides, infinite shadings of expression. If one was pleased, he laughed softly; As the plot developed, the audience discussed it in brief sentences. "This play is Otello, the Venice nigger," one man explained to us. For though scholars may differ as to whether Shakespeare meant the Moor for a white or a blackamoor, no doubt was permitted in the Teatro Italiano. Iago was a prime favorite. The horror with which his villany was resented disturbed my conventional ideas THERE ARE SO MANY MORE TROUBLESOME THINGS THAN BABIES. SIGNORA MAJORI. The leading lady at the Teatro Italiano. of Italian wickedness. "If that nigger knew what man-a that is, he would-a not trust heem," said one worthy, with a grave shake of the head. His companion replied, "Ain't he a son-a-gun-a!" and again, with increasing horror, "Ain't he son-a-gun-a!" I am not saying that this gentleness of instinct always went the full length of our moral code; even in the horror at Iago there was a keen spice of delight. A striking example of Latin morals occurred in a play written by a member of the Mulberry Street colony, O' Tuocco, which took its name from the game the Romans call mora, that one sees Italian bootblacks playing with their fingers. The husband here quarrels with his wife because she interferes with his gambling and carousing; and when he finds that while he was in prison for his misdeeds she has proved unfaithful, he stabs her in the back. "That's the way," he cries; "when a woman betrays you, stab her. And I've stabbed her." The curtain rang down amid loud and unqualified applause. A flash of this kind now and again is suggestive. The instinctive strength and delicacy of Italian affections may be more nearly allied to the animal than a sympathetic observer suspects. The scenery was oldfashioned and tattered, and not too varied or appropriate. The drama of O' Tuocco began in a backwoods log house, with bear-skins stretched on walls that trembled to shouts of cinque. It was doubtless the derelict of some longforgotten Bowery melodrama of American frontier life, and had trembled in ages past to the shouts of quarrelsome cowboys and to the rifles of whooping Indians. The second act of this play took place before a Grecian portico that might have stood on the Acropolis; and the husband stabbed his wife in an East Side parlor, above which downy clouds floated in blue ether. In Otello, while Desdemona and Emilia were awaiting their cues, they could plainly be seen through a hole in the castle wall seated on soap-boxes and gossiping companionably. In the bed scene we noticed that Desdemona's gown was inconveniently long in front; but until as she was going up stage to her couch her heels and ankles showed, we did not see that she had got it on wrong side before. When Brabantio was mounting to his window to answer Iago's summons, the whole wall quaked with his misguided struggles; and we quaked too, for we had heard of a Brabantio who missed the shutters and stuck his head out of the chimney. Our main joy was the prompter's box in the front-middle. The bill was changed every day, according to the Continental the whole the best in Europe. In Otello, custom, and there were sometimes two which is the most successful classic part and even three plays in an evening; so I saw him in, he doubtless had profited that, as happened in similar circumstances by the example of the elder Salvini. on the Elizabethan stage, the prompter And the very limitations of his stage was commander-in-chief. His long brown and his support may have emphasized finger could often be seen indicating where by contrast his passages of real powthe actors were to stand, and whose cue it er. Yet the fact remains that he played was to speak; and throughout the evening throughout with intelligence and dignity. his tired and raucous voice could be heard, In the scenes in the Venetian councileagerly galloping half a line ahead of the chamber his presence was fine, and his actors. Iago managed his lines with great manner full of repose; his delivery quiet astuteness. In his long argument with and impressive. His voice is rich and Roderigo, when he wanted the word he flexible and strong, and he does not squanwould put his palm to bis ear, and with der it. It rose to whatever volume or one eye devouring his victim and the pitch the lines required. In the scenes other on the prompter, he would whisper, "Ascolto!"(I am listening!) Notwithstanding all thisand one very soon gets used to it and accepts it like any other stage convention-the acting had surprising quality. Its virtue was simplicity and unconsciousness, traits which, in whatever surroundings, are allied to the best in art. In O' Tuocco the gainblers in the log-hut café were simply gamblers in a café. Whether they were supers and drank their wine in silence, or took the leading parts and quarrelled vociferously over who should pay for it, the conviction of their acting was so great that one forgot the logs and the bearskins. The comedian of the troupe had the genius of his quality: he could not move a foot or a shoulder without getting a laugh, and his occasional speeches were greeted with roars. One of his favorite devices was to spit on the shoes of the people he was talking with, which, as he did not speak a word of our language, could scarcely have been an Americanism. Of the leading man it is hard to give a just idea. He owed much beyond question to the Italian convention of acting, which is said by those who know to be on |