This effort resulted in six of the supers, who were gotten up in voluminous dominoes with elaborate, but inexpensive, pasteboard trimmings, and who were within hearing distance, falling stiff and stark to the stage.
"Does this kind of thing occur often?" I inquired.
"Oh," growled the Professor, "that gag was stuffed and on exhibition at the Centennial. It was found in an Indian mound near Memphis, and is old."
And so the talk went on for a while, when up went the curtain and King Pin leaping on the stage amidst the laughter and plaudits of the house, told how the pretty Prince Caprice had tired of mundane things and was heavily sighing for the fountain-head of the lambent silvery moonlight. Microscope, who was at the head of the Royal College of Astronomers, was besought to do something to aid the Prince in accomplishing the journey to Merrie Moonland, and in a neat speech unfolded his plans for a grand dynamo-etherial line that would speedily carry the Prince to the wished-for happy Land of Luna.
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.