Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Recollections of the Stage — Plays and Players — Frederick Warde — Henry Irving's Generosity—Edwin Booth—The Players Club—Death of Lawrence Barrett. My next appearance in print, after the Dickens article, was more successful; it was even a little remunerative, and it settled the whole course of my life. I had gone, in the 'seventies some time, to Booth's Theatre to see the return of the Boucicaults to the New York stage after a long absence. They played Jessie Brown, or the Siege of Lucknow, a drama which had stirred up all the young Scotch blood in New York to a remarkable extent when it was originally produced at Wallack's, in the early 'sixties. Many of the members of the first cast were dead; but I set down, in a thousand or two thousand words, all that could be remembered of the original production, and the article was carried to The Evening Mail. It was accepted and printed, and paid for,—at the rate of seven dollars a column. It was quoted, and copied, and talked about; and the author was asked for more in the same line. And so I stubbed my toe, as it were, and fell into the arms of a daily journal. The contribution was followed by a long, scattering, irregular series of " Recollections Gbe lacuna IDeteran 59 of the Stage," " By a Young Veteran," for which latter I was severely censured on the ground that a veteran must be a man old in years. Which is not true, for there were veteran drummer-boys among my acquaintances then, who had served in the Civil War, who were recognised as veterans and who were younger than I. The subject-matter selected always related to some current play or event of dramatic interest, the article stating what " The Young Veteran " knew or had seen or had read concerning similar events or plays in the palmy days of the pas...