Sara Jewett imagines that she commands success and enslaves her audiences by walking through her positions on the stage in her first scene every night before the curtain is rung up for the play.
MRS. BOUCICAULT.
The managers, too, share this weakness of their actors. None of them would change their ticket-boxes for fear of a change of luck. When they move they take their ticket-boxes with them. Wallack has the same boxes that were used at the doors of his father's theatre years ago, and Daly has those which received the pasteboards during his first season of success. When Tony Pastor removed from the Bowery to Broadway he took his boxes over there, and has them with him now in his tour over the country. With all our modern innovations and realism, we have not made any inroads on the folk-lore of the drama. The theatre is still fairy-land, and its creatures, though not fairies themselves, commune with them closely.
Actors like many other people have a perfect horror of the number thirteen. The only man in the profession who openly defies the superstition attaching to this number is John R. Rogers, the manager of the "My Sweetheart" Company, of which Minnie Palmer and Robert E. Graham are the star features. Rogers, it is said, not only got together a company of thirteen people, in which the thirteen letters of Mr. Graham's name stood out in uninviting prominence; but he began his season on Friday, the 13th of the month, and in other ways wooed a dire and speedy fate for himself and his people; but good luck appears to have attended him, and he is still defiant as ever of the terror-laden and ominous number. In contradistinction to Mr. Roger's success, the failure of another combination may be given. Frank L. Gardner, who has thirteen letters in his name, brought out the play "Legion of Honor," whose title is composed of exactly thirteen letters, and had Samuel W. Piercy,—who died last winter in Boston, while supporting Edwin Booth in his tour,—for leading man, and by doing so freighted down his enterprise with another ill-starred feature, for Mr. Piercy's name contained thirteen letters. The play failed, and the superstitious people of the profession immediately attributed the failure to the presence of too many baker's dozens in the organization. A certain well-known prima donna whose engagement was to begin on the 13th of the month went to the impresario and begged to have the date changed; she said she knew she would have no luck if she began to sing on the date provided for her; besides that her friends had persuaded her that fortune would only frown upon her if she made her first appearance on the 13th. The 12th was Friday, another day fraught with frightful evil to the singing and acting fraternity, so rather than make an unlucky beginning, the prima donna opened on the 11th, and sang two nights for nothing, although two nights' warbling under her contract meant an amount of money that would make a poor man's head swim.
The New York Dramatic News in a late number contained a funny story about Harry Courtaine and John E. Ince, both gentlemen well and favorably known in the profession. Mr. Ince had solemnly professed his non-belief in good or bad luck, after which he was invited by Mr. Courtaine to walk with him. The News tells the story in this happy style: To a query as to where he was going, Mr. Courtaine replied that he was to make an engagement for the coming season with a gentleman now awaiting him at the Union Square Hotel, "and I want a witness," he said, "but I wouldn't have one of those superstitious fellows with me for all the world. They make me ashamed of myself with their besotted—"
Mr. Courtaine stopped suddenly and turned deadly pale. "Here, here!" he cried, "cross fingers, quick!" and seizing Mr. Ince's hand, he crossed the forefinger of his own over it while a tramp with one arm slouched by them. "I saw him over my left shoulder, too," murmured Mr. Courtaine. "Dear me! dear me! how exceedingly annoying!"
"What's the matter?" asked Mr. Ince, whom the performance of his companion had thrown into a profound amazement. "Don't you feel well? What is it?"
MAUD GRANGER.