JAMES O'NEILL.
AN IDEAL "MASHER."
"Over the Rhine," in Cincinnati, is a great place for cheap and vicious amusements. A correspondent writing from there says: "The places of amusement "Over the Rhine" line Vine Street for half a dozen blocks. They are of the democratic and, with one exception, rude order, more familiar to the backwoods than to the civilization east of the Mississippi. Some are large establishments with all the fittings of an East Side variety theatre. Others are mere halls with a limited stage at one end. To some an admission is charged, ranging from ten cents up to twenty-five cents, but most of them are free. The performers include many familiar stars of the variety stage, for the salaries paid are of the best. The performances, though vulgar, are clean enough. The drinks pay all expenses, of course. Beer is served throughout the house and smoking is perpetually in order. In most places there is a gallery of boxes where the young women from the stage mingle with such of the audience as, by their generosity, deserve such honor. These are "stuffers," or as they call them here "chair warmers." One of them has conquered the soul of a local critic and he is actually puffing her into prominence in her peculiar line through the columns of one of the leading papers."
CHAPTER XXIX.
A TEAM OF IRISH COMEDIANS.
The variety stage is responsible for a great many theatrical "what-is-its." A few years ago there was not so much variety to the variety business; the projectors of mastodon and megatherian companies were not in the field to encourage poor artists, and only the really eminent and excellent in this branch of the profession were allowed to inflict themselves on first-class audiences. Now the dizziest of the throng make their way to the foot-lights under respectable auspices in the largest cities, and share with their really deserving brethern, about in equal parts, the sympathy and applause of large and fashionable houses. The different branches of the business are, at present, subdivided into more parts than there were formerly principal divisions, and every new feature of the profession has its exalted and also its insignificant exponents. There are a hundred and one different styles of song-and-dance men and song-and-dance women; serio-comics are as widely variant in their styles and repertoires, as they call the few songs they sing threadbare, as they are numerous and diverse in their types of beauty or ugliness; sketch artists have in their multiplicity infringed upon the legitimate comedians, the wild burlesques, and the highly operatic stars' territories; there are scores and scores of schools of musical mokes and thousands of performers with eccentric acts of one kind or another that are intended to astonish and bewilder the "natives," as they call the vast number of people who patronize their shows. But the Irish comedian stands out amid all these changes, immutable in his make-up and unmindful of the hoary age of the jokes with which he tortures the intelligent portions of his audiences. He has been dressed and redressed and placed before the public in any number of shapes that were intended to be novel, extending from the one extreme of the so-called neat Irish humorist to the other, at which stands the loud-mouthed, heel-clicking and head-breaking North of Ireland character; but the disguise is always thin, the efforts of the performers are vapid, and all the comedians succeed in looking pretty much alike, in saying the same melancholy things, and in betraying a kinship that is unmistakable and strongly provocative of pity.
