"'No, no,' I answered, and the matter ended. I couldn't help laughing, for truly I might have made a sharp bargain if I had wished. Somebody would have been sold, and that somebody not myself. I returned to Cincinnati after my trip to Nashville, and there found my effects awaiting me in good order. One day in the Burnet House I was accosted by a pleasant-looking gentleman, who informed me that he had taken charge of the bag from Louisville to Cincinnati.
"'Did not Mr. —— send it by express?' I asked.
"'No. I was coming up, and he thought it best to entrust it to me.'
"'I'm very much obliged to you,' I said.
"'Indeed, you have cause to be,' he said, good-naturedly. 'I give you my word it's the last time I'll have on my mind the charge of fifty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds.'"
After an English lady of rank returned from the continent, she found her trunk robbed of its jewels. Detectives traced the jewels to a London pawnshop, where they had been sold for $5. The thieves were arrested, and when one of them was asked why he had been so foolish as to sell nearly one hundred thousand dollars' worth of diamonds for $5, he answered: "Why, yer honor, we never thought for a minute as how they were real jewels; we just thought the lady was some play-actor woman, and that the whole lot wasn't worth but a few shillings."
JOSEPHINE D'ORME.
The trinkets are no more deceptive than are many other means employed to astonish and gladden the public. The production of thunder, the simulation of rain-fall, the fictitious roaring of winds, and the multiplication of suns, moons and stars are among the numerous illusions that give to the theatre that marvellous charm under whose spell thousands are nightly placed and held. In the olden times these effects were produced in a simple and by no means mystifying manner, but late years have made them so perfect in their application that none but the initiated can even begin to think out the solution of the wondrous effects in which the stage now abounds. A new effect, such as the enormous stretch of sea and sky to be found in "The World," is something that dramatic authors and stage mechanics are always seeking after and are glad to find. The revolving tower in "The Shaughran" was a puzzle to everybody. Now there are hundreds of effects of this kind with folding and vanishing scenes that are even more wonderful than Boucicault's tower. Viewed from the wings the simplicity of the means employed to produce these effects makes them absolutely laughable. They shall be explained in this chapter.
Thunder-storms are common efforts at realism, and they are sometimes simulated in a way that makes them appear to fall very little short of nature. The earliest style of stage thunder was effected by vigorously shaking a piece of sheet iron which made a rattling and ear-disturbing noise. Even now when a show is "on the road" and a hall without the usual first-class accessories must be used, the audience, and the actor too, must be satisfied with sheet-iron thunder. The modern invention is known as the thunder-drum, and it stands over the prompter's desk where it can be easily reached by a long stick with a thick, soft padding at the end—similar to the sticks used in beating bass-drums. The thunder-drum consists of a calf-skin tightly drawn over the top of a box frame. With this instrument the low rumbling of distant thunder or the long roll of the elemental disturbance may be attained, and, following the sharp rattling of the shaken sheet of iron and the flash of ignited magnesium an effect is produced that completely awes the simple citizen who knows nothing of the mechanism of the stage.