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AN ENDOWED THEATRE
direction. I saw it noted as a remarkable
circumstance, in one of my criticisms of
Mr. Fechter and Miss Leclercq, more than
twenty-five years ago, that the chief artists
were called before the curtain " as many
as five times " at the end of the most im-
portant act of a classic play. On the night
when Cyrano de Bergerac was first pro-
duced in Paris, elderly men shouted their
bravos, and, at the close of the third act,
embraced one another, with tears of joy,
crying out, " Le Cid! Le Cid!" If that
spectacle, which is truly impressive, seems
absurd to a Bostonian, what has he to say
to one of his own first-night audiences,
which, a few years since, brought a pleas-
ing little actress, who had done a bit of
pretty comedy gracefully and piquantly,
seventeen times to the footlights, midway
of the performance, bestowing such honors
and plaudits upon the player as she would
scarcely have deserved if she had been
Miss Neilson and Miss Cushman rolled
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