PAULINE MARKHAM.
Then came the glorious moment when the flight moonwards was to be made. I hurried around to the prompter's side of the stage where I saw the mouth of the huge cannon gaping, and got there as they were about to fire it. Imagine my surprise to find the extraordinary piece of ordnance made entirely of pasteboard, a substance that a few grains of gunpowder would blow into as many pieces as the leaves of Vallambrosia. Still the passengers were to be fired out of this contrivance, and I felt that if they and the cannon could stand it, it was none of my business. It had all been explained to the audience, that King Pin, Prince Caprice and Prof. Microscope were the only three persons to be given seats in the cartridge-cab in which the wonderful journey was to be made. The question therefore naturally arose, what was to become of the multitude of characters that crowded the "wings." There were "supers" in black, yellow and mottled dominoes with high papier-maché casques, and huge ear-trimmings that reminded one of the flaps that decorate the sides of a Chicago girl's head, or the sails of a lake lumberman. There were star-gazers with zodiacal garments and tin telescopes, all set off by great pairs of soda-bottle-lens eye-glasses, that gave them the air of a Secchi, or somebody else of astronomical aspect. There were guards who shouldered tooth brushes made entirely of wood, with index hands surmounting the tops of their chapeaux and serving to indicate that their intellects had gone moon-hunting; and there were other creatures, among them, horrible genii, who started for the moon by some short route across lots and got there long before the regular excursionists.
But the corps de ballet! It was everything but a beauty. If there is anything likely to strike a theatre-goer as ludicrous, it is an awkward squad of over-grown girls, with gauze-garnished limbs and dissipated-looking blonde wigs. A precocious ballet-debutante is a bit of Dead-Sea fruit shot backward off Terpsichore's head, and if the bullet does not lay Terpsichore herself out in a first-class undertaker's style it is because Terpsichore happens to be in terribly good luck. These reflections were suggested by a sight of the intermingling danseuses that kept pretty well in the rear of the stage. You could tell the height to which each one could safely fling her foot on looking at her. The girl who was making her first appearance had not yet gotten over her splayfootedness, and every time she took a peep at the audience and began to realize the airiness of her costume and gawkiness of her manners, her knees knocked together fast enough to keep a few notes ahead of her chattering teeth. And her dress! there was nothing marvellous about it—nothing that would carry a person off into the ideal financial realms of a national debt. It was powerfully plain with a stiff and provoking effort at showiness. The next line, who also may be classed as figurantes, are plainly to be distinguished by their natty air of sauciness and a noticeable clipping-off of the super-abundant clothing that encumbers the latest additions to the corps. The coryphees, though, are radiant in glittering, close-fitting silver mail, and there is acquired grace in their actions, and a high haughtiness in the toss of their heads. The premieres everybody understands and recognizes, who has once seen them pirouette on their toes or slam around in a wild ecstasy of dancing delight that would give anybody else a vertigo and lead to numerous and possibly serious dislocations. Well, all these were whispering or prattling together, in the way of the scene-shifters, who went around reckless of their language, with sleeves rolled up and anxious faces and questioning eyes turned upon all whom they encountered there. It struck me, as I gazed upon this almost naked and highly interesting ballet, that if the moon had no atmosphere, as those who know best claim, the costumes of these gay and giddy girls were airy enough to stock it with a pretty extensive and healthy one. Out of this jumble of scenery and from the midst of these jostling characters the start was made for the moon. There was no carriage, no cartridge, no load in the cannon. Her trip as a trip was a most undisguised and diaphanous fraud. While King Pin, the Prince, the Professor, and the rest were arranging themselves in a happy tableau behind the second "flat" bang! went a gun fired by one of the supers, across the stage flew several "dummies" or stuffed figures in the direction of the roof, the scene opened and lo the jolly crowd were in Moonland. King Pin, Prince Caprice and Microscope were there together, as fresh and fair as if they were accustomed to making two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-mile trips. The monarch of the moon, King Kosmos (W. A. Mestayer), after having summoned his retinue of Selenites—the same long-robed, pillow-stomached and pasteboard-eared crew who had died behind the scenes a few minutes before from an over-stroke of punning—and having things explained to everybody's satisfaction, came forward and fell on the several necks of the terrestrial visitors, was punched in the paunch, by the King, enough times to set all the Moonites into roars of laughter, and then they all joined in stretching their necks and rasping their throats in a welcoming chorus to their guests.
ADAH ISAAC MENKEN.
It was unfortunate for the visitors that King Kosmos had a beautiful little princess of a daughter called Fantasia (Miss Gracie Plaisted), with a voice that rippled and rolled in music, earthly as the bulbul's notes and celestial as the songs of the spheres; and, of course, foolish little Caprice had to go and fall in love with her and sing innumerable sweet songs to her, all of which only got poor old Pin and his friends into all sorts of trouble. This they finally managed to get out of by returning to mother earth in a gorgeously-appointed flying ship, as grand as Cleopatra's galley. Before decamping, however, Moonland was visited in every part, and its gardens of silver-tinged foliage, its crystal palaces, that made pale Luna's light more brilliant still, its icy mountains with mass of frostage, in and about which the ballet wound in the graceful rhythm of "Les Flocons de Niege," were all taken in, and notwithstanding an occasional hitch in getting the panorama around, everything in this new and gleaming sphere was really glorious for a first-night visit.
MILLIE LA FONTE.
CHAPTER VII.
IN THE DRESSING-ROOM.
These same people who appear grotesque, and out of the pale of ordinary every-day existence on the stage, are nearly always the most unromantic and realistic-looking folks in the world when you meet them on the street. The extraordinary metamorphosis they go through to arrive at an appearance suitable for presentation before the foot-lights is a secret of the dressing-room. In the privacy of this carefully guarded apartment street clothes are laid aside, and what is more wonderful still, faces, eyes, and hands and lower limbs, too, very frequently, are subjected to processes that produce the most remarkable results. Anybody who has seen Nat Goodwin, of "Hobbies" reputation, will readily understand that it takes a pretty extensive transformation to change his appearance from that of the man to that of Prof. Pygmalion Whiffles, the eccentric character that makes "Hobbies" the laughable and popular play that it is. Mr. Goodwin is young—not more than twenty-four—but I saw him slip out of his youthfulness into the bald-headed, red-wigged and merry old professor one night in almost as short a time as it takes a boy to fall through a four-story elevator shaft. I accompanied him to his dressing-room one night. He had just a few minutes to get ready, and was in proper shape in time to make his appearance at the upper entrance, amid the crash that always accompanies his first appearance in the play, and gives him an opportunity to make some remarks about Maj. Bang's dog, which has ripped his "ulster" up the back. Well, Goodwin went to work the moment he was inside the door. Off came the everyday clothes, and in a jiffy on went the one white and black stocking that will be remembered by all who have seen "Hobbies." The shirt, coat, pantaloons, linen duster and hat that forms the rest of his toilet, were carefully laid upon a side table. The shirt was flapped over his head in a second, the pantaloons went on like lightning and then bending towards a looking-glass he dipped his fingers in red and black color boxes, and soon had the necessary