“Sarah.”
“What shall I do?” asked the old man with tears in his eyes. “She is bound to have her way. She always was that way as a child.”
“Better send the despatch and then cash the check and go to Paris.”
“I guess I’ll have to,” said the old man, and he started for the telegraph office.
BETTER THEATER PROGRAMS
Innovation at Weber’s May Result in the Disappearance of Smudgy Blanket Sheets in Other Playhouses.
When the late Clement Scott, the well-known English dramatic critic, visited this country in 1900, he wrote his impressions of American theaters for the London Sketch and devoted his second paragraph to the bill of the play. His comment ran as follows:
No fees for programs? I should think not, indeed! You find a huge stack of them under your very nose, and you can take any number you like, from one to one hundred. The difficulty Is to find the actual program when you have possessed yourself of one of these bulky pamphlets, for there is only a “halfpennyworth of program” amid “an intolerable deal of sack” in the way of advertisements and facetiæ.
But Mr. Scott failed to mention the worst feature of the American programs—the black smut left on the ladies’ gloves and the men’s knuckles from the smudgy type with which they are printed. The sixpence one must part with in order to become possessed of a London house-bill is really not begrudged in exchange for the neat card, folded at the two sides to make it convenient for the pocket and on which the most prominent features are the details respecting the play you have come to see.
In New York the program concession has been for years in the hands of a big firm which has paid the theaters large sums for the privilege of distributing bills of the play, and audiences have had to submit in patience to what this monopoly was pleased to give them. But there is hope ahead and Joe Weber deserves the credit for being the pioneer in a worthy innovation to make theatergoing the all round pleasure it ought to be.