And yet the outcome would seem to prove that she was only a shrewd woman of good common sense, after all. Her managers followed "The Eternal City" with Hall Caine's "Prodigal Son," and lost mighty sums upon it.
It is interesting to recall that before Miss Allen finally decided on "The Christian" with which to inaugurate her stellar career she was minded to use a version of Longfellow's "Courtship of Miles Standish". She is very bookishly inclined, and has said that there are two things she prefers to acting—to be an author or to serve as a trained nurse.
Nine years ago, when she was at the height of her success at the Empire, she was asked by a certain paper to state what in her opinion was the one drawback to the full enjoyment of life on the stage, and her prompt answer was "Monotony, the deadly routine engendered by the long run."
WILSON CAME WITH CLOGS.
Comedian Might Have Gone in for Tragedy
Had the Wind Not Blown His
Credentials Into a River.
According to a story current some years since, which may or may not be a press-agent yarn, the only reason Francis Wilson is not a tragedian is because a gust of wind blew into the Schuylkill his letter of introduction to the late E.L. Davenport. Like Hopper, Wilson is a native of Philadelphia, where he was born in 1854. The nimbleness of his legs sent him to the stage, where he began as a clog-dancer with a minstrel troupe in the farce, "The Virginia Mummy."
It was during this engagement that he conceived the ambition for the legitimate and obtained from his manager the letter to Davenport, which blew out of his hand as he was reading it on a bridge in Fairmount Park. He claims he hadn't the courage to ask for another one, but struck out for better things later on in a different direction. But this was after he had formed a partnership with James Mackin, with whom he toured the country as one of a song-and-dance team. The two played a long engagement in New York with the San Francisco Minstrels at their "opera house," now the Princess Theater.
Instructor in Fencing.
Around the Centennial year he returned to Philadelphia and set about realizing his aspirations by obtaining an engagement in very small parts at Mrs. John Drew's Arch Street Theater. This brought him in only ten dollars a week against the fifty he had been getting for clog work. But he made himself popular with the members of the company, and eked out his pay by giving them lessons in fencing and boxing, arts in which he was specially proficient. Indeed, he had just won in a contest, at what is now Madison Square Garden, the title of amateur champion swordsman of America.
These friends in the Drew company aided him in obtaining better parts, and the next year he was engaged as utility man at the Chestnut Street Theater, which then had a stock company. A year with Annie Pixley and another as the Baron in "Our Goblins" brought him up to his engagement as comedian by McCaull for the Casino troupe, where he made his notable hit as Cadeaux, one of the two thieves in "Erminie."