convey any notion of reality. Of course, his finish and excellent poise were to be noted, as always, but even these seemed overelaboration, although he impersonated that fabulous creature, a polished American diplomat. Mr. Charles Cherry was neither distinguished nor uncouth as the junior hero. Mr. William Hawtrey's abilities did not show to their best advantage in the part of a veteran member of a foreign diplomatic service.

Better acted, "The Ambitious Mrs. Alcott" might have held the interest, although it could never be more than an ordinary drama. With its present interpretation it is not even that.

OMPARISONS are unquestion

ably odious to the compared party who suffers by the comparison. It is unfortunate for an American company like that performing "Mrs. Alcott" to come into such immediate contrast with the smooth, easy and natural methods of the support with which Signor Novelli has surrounded himself. LIFE does not know how the Italian company ranks in its own country, but certainly there is not in America a company which could go on week after week, as this one has, performing a different play almost every evening, with scenery and properties of the most makeshift kind, and at the same time provide an almost perfect stage ensemble. In view of the remark attributed to Mr. Mansfield (falsely, perhaps) that he did not care to see Novelli, as the Italian artist could teach us nothing, it may seem presumptuous for LIFE to suggest that American actors and actresses who still believe that they have something to learn should not fail to see this work of the Italians. The

Novelli engagement has been extended another week. American theatregoers and artists alike will find in these performances much of educational value.

A

* * *

MATEUR performances are, as a rule, rather deadly occasions and of little importance to any one except to those who act in them and to their immediate friends. Very considerable artistic value, however, attaches to the recent presentations of Ibsen's "The Pretenders," at the WaldorfAstoria, by the Yale Dramatic Association. The play has never been done before in English and, with the exception of a recent performance of "The Vikings" by the pupils of Mr. Franklin Sargent, this is the only opportunity American audiences have had to see the earlier Ibsen in stage performance. Of course it is not the social analyst of Hedda and Nora that is encountered here. It is the modern skald and writer of sagas who unfolds in dramatic form a chapter of his nation's history, although with it goes much of mental analysis. To present so elaborate a play was a great undertaking for a college organization and that it was accomplished in a fashion to bring sincere praise from so ardent a lover of Ibsen as Mr. William Archer shows that the work was a credit to the scholarship and energy of Yale undergraduates.

Of greater importance than the creditable rendering of a difficult and imposing classic is the creating of a new sphere of university activity which may be of the greatest future benefit to the American theatre and dramatic literature in America. LIFE has long contended that the public was largely to blame for the present decadent condition of the stage in America. If other universities follow the excellent example set by Yale and direct the natural love of young men for the theatre and its affairs into higher channels than those of farce and burlesque, it means the rapid spreading of an intelligent leaven among American theatregoers which is bound to raise the standard of public taste and public requirement. It may even mean bringing into the business of the theatre and onto the stage itself a different order of brains from that which now controls the destinies of one of if not the greatest of the popular educational forces at our command.

This production of an Ibsen play by a company of Yale youths may not, at first glance, seem an event of great importance. If it means, as it seems to, an activity in the classical and legitimate drama on the part of the universities and colleges the country over it is bound to be of tremendous value in determining the future of the theatre and the theatregoing public in America.

Metcalfe.

LIFE'S CONFIDENTIALS GUIDE TO THE THEATRES

Academy of Music-General Lew Wallace's "BenHur." dramatized and presented in spectacular form. A stor-"The Ambitious Mrs. Alcott," by Ditrichstein and Pollard. See opposite.

Belasco "The Rose of the Rancho." Interesting and picturesque drama dealing with the taking over of California by the United States. Well acted.

Berkeley Lyceum-"The Reckoning." Katherine Grey and good company intelligently interpreting clever little Viennese student drama.

Bijou-Mme. Alla Nazimova in "Comtesse Coquette." Notice later.

Casino "The White Hen." Amusing comic opera with Mr. Louis Mann as the star. Well sung. Criterion-"The Tattooed Man." Well-staged comic opera of the conventional type, with Mr. Frank Daniels as the star.

Empire-Ethel Barrymore in répertoire. Garrick-"Caught in the Rain." Mr. William Collier and excellent cast in laughable little farcical comedy.

Hackett-"The Chorus Lady." The title rôle laughably portrayed by Rose Stahl.

Herald Square-"The Orchid," with Mr. Eddie Foy as the star. Notice later.

Hippodrome-Water play, ballet, spectacle and circus features. All good.

Knickerbocker-"The Red Mill." Comic opera by Messrs. Herbert and Blossom, with Messrs. Montgomery and Stone as comedians. Musical and funny. Lincoln Square-William Morris Stock Company in repertory.

Lyric-Signor Ermete Novelli in repertory.

Madison Square-"The Three of Us." Carlotta Nillson and well-selected company in agreeable and interesting play of American life in the West.

Madison Square Garden-The Barnum and Bailey circus. As marvelous, megatherian and multitudi

ONE CUTE LITTLE GIRL,
IN YOUR FOND EMBRACE,
IS BETTER THAN TWO
IN SOME OTHER PLACE.

MR.

R. CARL SNYDER, in his history, or perhaps one might say his biography, of our present conception of the sidereal mechanism, The World Machine, has addressed himself with especial felicity to a special audience; an audience grown somewhat critical and disdainful of "popular" expositions of science and philosophy, yet debarred by lack of training and by intellectual habit from unmediated intercourse with either. By emphasizing most interestingly and effectively the human and psychological aspects of man's successive advances toward a consistent cosmogony, he cloaks the elementary character of his explanations and makes real a history that is too frequently unrealized. And even his extremely rhetorical and "literary" style may prove a well calculated argumentum ad hominem.

One of the most original and (to quote a pet phrase of the author's) one of the most "affording" of the new books is Gelett Burgess's story of The White Cai. Strikingly unusual incidents from real life form, in ordinary hands, a far more unstable foundation for fiction than situations frankly impossible. But Mr. Burgess has given to the case of " "double sonality" upon which the plot of The White Cat rests, so piquant a setting, and makes it suggest to our aroused imaginations such startling and unrealized possibilities, that it vibrates between the glamor of fairy tale and the stark horror of the uncannily tragic.

per

The preface of Emersor. Hough's The Story of the Outlaw leads one to expect sketches of "bad men" and desperadoes served with sufficient sociological sauce to disguise the rank flavor of the native meat. One even imagines that a boy whose hair is turning gray may spend an afternoon with the book with something of the furtive joy with which he once read Jesse James biographies in the haymow. But poor sauce does not improve even poor meat. Mr. Hough's desperadoes are

graphic enough but his commentative chapters are oracular and unimpressive.

George Homer Meyer's tale of border chivalry in Spanish California, The Nine Swords of Morales, is a simply told and spiritedly ingenuous bit of genuine ro

mance.

Unfortunately the word "romance" is like a carpenter's chisel which has been used to cut nails. Its edge is full of nicks, but it is all, we have. I use it to connote brave deeds, the love of love and ideals visualized.

Salvage, by Aquila Kempster, the story of an impulsive crime and its consequences, is a novel of the mushroom family but belongs to an edible variety. One swallows the plot with instinctive hesitancy and suspicion, born of its fungoid coincidences and highly colored developments; yet the actual flavor is pleasant enough, its characters make agreeable chance acquaintances and many of its scenes, both the quiet and the tumultuous ones, are depicted with imagination and good taste.

The Unseen Jury, by Edward Clary Root, is the story of a suspicious death, of an accusation of murder founded on circumstantial evidence carefully provided, and of a great criminal trial in which the hero appears as counsel for his dearest enemy and rival in love, and the author drives a coach and four through the rules of evidence. It is a novel in one dimension. It has length but neither breadth nor depth.

If any one has lost a couple of nice, cheerful Sunday-school stories, answering to the names of Breezy and A Good Samaritan, they are to be found among the Little Comic Masterpieces, the first number of which was E. P. Butler's exceedingly funny Pigs Is Pigs. We don't know how they got there but perhaps some one left the bars down and they strayed in. Breezy is a grocer's clerk whose rise in life is described by J. George Frederick; and the Good Samaritan is a divinity student whose rescue of an inebriated friend is rewarded (by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews) by a call to a prize parish.

The Psychic Riddle is the title of a little volume in which Isaac K. Funk discusses the public attitude toward what are commonly called spiritualistic phenomena, and describes certain of his ad

ventures and observations as an investigator. Mr. Funk's own position is one of open minded inquiry, which has naturally led to his being looked upon as a "crank" by both the enthusiasts and the indifferent. His brochures, however, if only for their unquestionable honesty, are interesting to all to whom unsolved riddles appeal; but his hopes of popular appreciation of the importance of this particular problem will scarcely be realized until the day (perhaps not distant) when some spiritualistic Newton shall proclaim the law of psychic gravitation and some occult Edison perfect the telepathophone. J. B. Kerfoot.

The World Machine, by Carl Snyder. (Longmans, Green and Company. $2.50.)

The White Cat, by Gelett Burgess. (The BobbsMerrill Company, Indianapolis. $1.50.) The Story of the Outlaw, by Emerson Hough. (The Outing Company. $1.50.)

The Nine Swords of Morales, by George Homer Meyer. (Henry Altemus Company, Philadelphia.) Salvage, by Aquila Kempster. (D. Appleton and Company. $1.50.)

The Unseen Jury, by Edward Clary Root. (Frederick A. Stokes Company.)

Breezy, by J. George Frederick. (McClure, Phillips and Company. $0.50.)

A Good Samaritan, by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews. (McClure, Phillips and Company. $0.50.) The Psychic Riddle, by I. K. Funk. (The Funk and Wagnalls Company. $1.00.)

AVT SCISSORS AVT NULLVS

THE USUAL THING

Hurry has robbed correspondence of its grace.-Nineteenth

Century.]

Just a line to tell you, dearest,

Think that all at home goes right,
Don't quite know, for by the merest
Accident was late last night.

Dined at club; quite spoilt the joints were-
Not like our home dinners, duck-
Had a hand at bridge-the points were
Nominal, but shocking luck.

So, some dibs would make you cheerful,
Sorry I have none to send,

Business calls just now are fearful.

Come home soon-you're missed, no end.

Flu and measles at the Jacksons',

Smith's wife's sloped (Brown's missing, too). Smith seems mad, and his plain Saxon's

What I can't repeat to you.

Well, there's no more news worth knowing

Cold's worse-one that nothing cures

Love to kiddies! Post just going,

So excuse scrawl. Always yours.

-New York Globe.

"IT IS wickeder to adulterate a man's food than to pick his pocket. Who steals my purse steals trash, but he who filches from me my good health-well, he's a possible murderer."

The speaker, pushing away, with horror, a dish of preserved strawberries, went on:

"The Germans actually do regard it as wickeder to adulterate a man's food than to steal from him, and they punish the food adulterater twice as severely as the pickpocket.

"In a German court I once saw a shabby pickpocket-he had stolen two dollars-sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Directly afterward a millionaire canner was convicted of adulterating canned beans with a chemical that was likely to give you erysipelas or quinsy. With us the canner would have gotten off with a fine, but the German judge indignantly sentenced him to two years.

***And I regret,' the German judge added, 'that the law does not allow me to make your sentence harder.'"-Independent.

PREPARING FOR THE WORST

A French gentleman anxious to find a wife for a nephew went to a matrimonial agent, who handed him his list of lady clients. Running through this he came to his wife's name, entered as desirous of obtaining a husband between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five-a blond preferred. Forgetting his nephew, he hurried home to announce his discovery to his wife. The lady was not at all disturbed. "Oh, yes," she said, "that is my name. I put it down when you were so ill in the spring and the doctors said we must prepare for the worst."-American Press.

LIFE is published every Thursday. $5.00 a year in advance. Postage to foreign countries in the Postal Union, $1.04 a year extra. Single current copies, 10 cents. Back numbers, after three months from date of publication, 25 cents.

LIFE is for sale by all Newsdealers in Great Britain. The International News Company, Bream Building, Chancery Lane, London, E. C., England, AGENTS.

Saarbach's News Exchange, 1, New Coventry Street, Leicester Square, W., London; Saarbach's

SAVED THE SITUATION

She raised her head from his shoulder for a moment. "Do you believe that exercise and lotions and toilet preparations will improve a woman's looks?" she asked. He pressed her blond curls back upon his chest. "They couldn't improve the looks of some women," he said. "Whose?" she asked.

"Well, yours and Violet Cochrane's, for instance," he replied, thoughtlessly.

"I don't understand you," she said, raising her head for the second time and chilling him with a look. "We are not at all alike."

"I mean," he replied, turning her head for the second time and thinking quickly, "that your looks couldn't be improved because they are perfect as they are, and that hers couldn't be improved because no amount of work could make her pretty." And the firelight flickered knowingly as she sighed a great sigh of contentment and relief, while he drew a deep breath.-Penny Pictorial.

MR. HARE, in his book, "The Last of the Bushrangers," says that in the early days of the Ballarat diggings in Australia a police officer was very ill with an abscess of the liver, and the doctors had all given him up.

A police magistrate had watched over him night and day, and when all hope seemed to be gone the dying man said to his benefactor:

"My dear fellow, you have been very good to me, and I want to leave you something. I am the only man in camp who has a pair of boot-trees. When I am gone you may have them."

The magistrate was very grateful. The next day he went into the sick-room softly, believing that his friend was dying or dead, and took possession of the boot-trees; but before he could get out of the room with them the owner, who had been watching him, suddenly started up, and called out:

"Come, come, now! Just leave those trees alone. I'm not dead yet."

The sudden attempt to rise burst the abscess, and he recovered. Years afterward the boot-trees used to be shown as "life-preservers."-Rochester Herald.