"It's all off," he said; "nothing doing in the cottage line for me."

I asked him what had happened to change his mind so suddenly.

"Well, Bill," he said, "you know I am not a chap who goes hunting for trouble; I'm nervous; I don't like to be troubled with other people's troubles. This afternoon I was over to Bob Eaton's, and you know he has got some cottages up at the other end of the lake that he rents, furnished."

"Yes, I knew that."

"Well," continued Connelly, "while I was over to Bob's this afternoon a man who has rented one of these cottages came down there. He had left his cottage and driven twelve miles down to Bob's house to make a kick; and what do you suppose the kick was?"

"Haven't the least idea."

"There wasn't any nutmeg grater in the cottage. Twelve miles to make a five-cent kick. And my cottages would be only two hundred feet away. No landlord business for your Uncle Edward. No, sir."

THE TROUBLES OF THE LAUGH GETTERS

It is a solemn business, this getting laughs for a living. Supposing the people don't laugh. Then how are you going to live? Take an act that you have been doing for weeks. Every afternoon and every night the audience laughs at exactly the same lines; this goes on night after night, week after week and city after city. Then you go into some city like Toronto or St. Paul and Hamlet's soliloquy would get as many laughs as you do.

Now what are you going to do? Other players on the bill are getting laughs right along and you, in the language of the stage, are "dying standing up."

I have had the same experiences off the stage. I once tried to tell an old German gentleman in St. Louis a story that had been highly recommended to me as being funny. It was about a man going up to a St.

Louis policeman and asking him the quickest way to get to the Mt. Olive hospital. The policeman told him to go over to Grogan's saloon and call the bartender an A. P. A.

Then I waited for the laugh. And immediately I knew I had a Toronto audience. The old man studied a moment, then said,

"Why did he not tell him to take an Olive Street car?"

An old lady from Brooklyn was visiting us. I told her one of Lew Dockstader's stories. How he had a girl over in Brooklyn. Her father was an undertaker. And Lew could always tell how business was with the old man by the looks of the table. If he had had a good job lately there would be flowers on the table, and ice on the b.u.t.ter.

I waited for the laugh. "But the giggle that he longed for never came."

The old lady looked up with a look of interest and said,

"Did he say what their name was? Perhaps we knew them."

I met a banker in Toronto. I tried to tell him a story referring to the banking business, hoping against hope that I might get one laugh in that city. I told him about a colored man who went into a colored bank down South and wanted to draw out his deposit of twenty dollars that had been in there for eight years. And the colored cashier told him he did not have any money in there. That the interest had eaten it up long ago.

"Yes," said the banking gentleman, with a pitying smile, "very clever.

But he was wrong, you know; interest adds to your princ.i.p.al, not detracts."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Playing Hoboken.]

William Cahill was playing Hoboken. Hoboken is entirely Dutch. William is entirely Irish. Result, William, on his opening show, did not get a laugh or a hand. After his act was over he stood around, dazed, for a few minutes; then he made his way over to the "peek hole," looked out and sized up the audience carefully, then turned away, muttering to himself,

"This is a h---- of a place for an Irishman."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Carrying "The Old Man" With Her.]

Mr. and Mrs. Harry Foy carried a nurse-maid for their little girl. When I came in to the theater I would always go in and speak to the nurse-maid and the baby. Then after I was made up I would come in again and visit them. But the maid never knew that I was the same fellow; and along the last of the week she began to wonder what ever became of that old chap she saw around the stage during the show, but never afterwards.

So she went over to Miss Dayne and said,

"Say, do you carry that old man with you or do you get a new one in every town?"

"Well," said Clarence Drown, manager of the Los Angeles Orpheum, "she is one of those women you are always glad to learn is the wife of some man you don't like."

Freddie Niblo, Jr., sat on the floor in their New York home one day, thinking it over. Finally he looked up at his mother (Josephine Cohan) and said,

"Say, Mama, wouldn't it be nice if you had a regular husband instead of an actor husband? Then perhaps he would be at home sometimes."

A well known Booking Agency had just transferred one of the stenographers from the New York office to the Chicago office. On her first morning in the new office she came over to the manager and said,

"I suppose you start the day the same here as they do in the New York office?"

"Why--er--yes--I suppose so," said the manager.

"Well, kiss me then, and let me get to work."

ASLEEP WITH HER SWITCH

A certain young lady (and Abe Jacobs says he knows she was a lady because she told him so, adding the information that any one who said she wasn't was a ---- ---- liar) was appearing at the Majestic Theater in Chicago not so very long ago. Owing to conditions over which she, apparently, had no control, the exact hours of her appearance were a little uncertain. Her first entrance was rather a dramatic affair. One of the other characters, hearing a noise behind a certain door, would draw a revolver, aim it at the door, and say--

"Come out! Come out, or I will shoot!"

Upon this occasion everything ran smoothly--up to this point; the gentleman had drawn his revolver and ordered her to appear.

"Come out!" he said; "come out or I will shoot!"

But there was nothing doing; so he repeated,