A Pasteboard Crown: A Story of the New York Stage

I will place the crown upon your head, said the actor-manager; only promise not to reproach me when you find for yourself that it is only pasteboard!
Author of Life on the Stage, etc.
Copyright, 1902, by
Clara Morris Harriott

It was on a Monday, the 30th of April, that the boys with the grocers' and butchers' delivery wagons, the gray-uniformed postmen behind their bony, always-tired horses, and the blue-coated, overfed mounted policemen began to circulate the report that the old White house had found a tenant; and every soul that listened made answer: Impossible! No one could live in that old rookery! and then, with incredible inconsistency, ended with: Who's taken it?
At first no answer could be given to that question, but later in the day a man who strung telegraph wires won a brief importance through overhearing a conversation between two men standing below him and beside the pole he was mounted on. One man was Jacob Brewer, who now owned the old White estate, and the other he ascertained, by careful listening, to be John Lawton; and he learned that Mr. Lawton was to take possession of the old house the next day, which would be May 1st, the conventionally correct day for moving.
Through the usual suburban channels this bit of information was put into circulation and swiftly reached every householder in the village—to say nothing of outlying farmhouses. And everywhere women with towels about their heads—sure sign that the house-cleaning microbe is abroad in the land—could be seen talking over back fences to neighbors whose fingers were still puckered from long immersion in the family wash-tub, and the name Lawton and such disjointed exclamations as: Who? Why—how many do you suppose? and Did you ever hear of such a thing? filled the warm air, even as the frail, inconsequent little May-flies filled it.
The telegraph lineman over his noon beer told many times what old Brewer had called the stranger: Lawton—yes, John Lawton—was the name, and he was coming up the next day; yes, come to think of it, he had said they were coming—so there was a family of some sort. The letter-carrier, in leaving the mail, paused a moment to catch these last words, and at his next stopping-place he was enabled to leave with a letter the information that John Lawton, who had taken that roofless old sheebang, had a family coming with him ; and the lady informed made sure he would not have a family very long, if he tried to keep them in that mouldering old ruin. Doctors hearing the news exchanged jests as they met on the roads, one opining that some business was coming their way and that quinine would soon be in demand, while another, always a pessimist, said that any one that was poor enough to take the White house to live in was too hard up to pay a doctor.