26 SUNSHINE AND SPORT IN 



One typical melodrama I saw at Belasco's Theatre, 

 entitled The Girl of the Golden West, the plot of 

 which was based on life in the old mining camps of 

 California. Miss Blanche Bates, an extremely 

 clever little actress, sustained the trying role of the 

 only woman in a heavy caste, and some of the 

 "pictures" relied on wonderful effects of lighting. 

 One of the most thrilling of many dramatic situa- 

 tions was that in which a wounded highwayman, 

 hiding in a loft, is betrayed to the pursuing sheriff 

 by his life's blood oozing through the rafters on the 

 hand of the sleuth-hound beneath. Even the dear 

 old Adelphi in its halcyon days offered no stronger 

 meat than this. Alas ! how I should have enjoyed 

 it all twenty-five years earlier, who now found it 

 hard to refrain from hysterical laughter. The love 

 of an American audience for a display of the 

 primitive emotions is the eternal joy of their play- 

 wrights, and these score heavily with homely pathos 

 that would fall flat on a company of older civilisa- 

 tion. Americans often pretend to be ashamed of 

 their easily-stirred emotions, and sometimes feign 

 a callousness foreign to their nature. Many amus- 

 ing- tales miaht be told to illustrate this weakness 

 of theirs. A famous New York Mayor was sup- 

 posed to tell of himself that on the morning when 

 his father died of a seizure he was eating a buck- 

 wheat cake at breakfast when the nurse came to 

 report that the old man was sinking fast. 



" Before I was halfway through a second buck- 

 wheat cake," he is supposed to have added, "she 

 came again and said that the old man was dead." 

 They have also a partiality for anecdotes bearing 

 on "graft" and other roguery. "Good Lord!" 



