ROYLE TOOK MANY BUFFETS.
Author of "The Squaw Man" Has a Run
of Ill-Luck to Thank for His
Success as a Playwright.
Edwin Milton Royle, author of "The Squaw Man," is another of that countless army brought up to the law and who sidetracked themselves to the stage. He spent his youth in a place that seems to breed actors so freely—Salt Lake City—where he attended the same Presbyterian school as Maude Adams. He is now on the sunny side of fifty, having graduated from Princeton in 1883.
Amateur theatricals at college are responsible for the lure that drew him to the professional footlights. After Princeton he went to continue his studies in Edinburgh, and there he took prominent part in a great performance of the students that had among its spectators some of the most prominent men in Great Britain.
On his return to America he set about studying law in New York, but he did not really settle down to it. The inclination toward the stage had by this time become too strong to be resisted. He began to make a tour of the manager's offices in search of an opening.
In this he had no better luck than usually falls to the lot of the unknown. Men in power along the Rialto did not know what he could do, and it was not to be expected that many of them would take the time to let him prove his abilities. At last, however, he secured, through Eugene W. Presbrey, an interview with the late A.M. Palmer, who gave him the small part of the boy in "Young Mrs. Winthrop," at the Madison Square Theater. From that he drifted to other small parts in the company of Edwin Booth, while the latter was at the Fifth Avenue Theater, and the next season he was with Booth and Barrett during their engagement at the Broadway.