When you go into a Continuous Vaudeville show you expect to see all sorts of acrobatic marvels, trained animals, and funny people. You expect to hear sweet singers, talented musicians, and funny comedians. But once in awhile you see and hear some little gem of sincere, heart interest.

And so, just in order to give that little touch of the "heart interest," I am going to tell you of a couple of little incidents that came into our lives at different times.

One night several years ago we were playing in a little town way up in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The night telegraph operator at the railroad station was an old schoolmate of mine. And so after the show was over I went over to the station to have a visit with him. It was a still cold night in the middle of winter and we sat around the little stove in his office, talking over our boyhood days back in New Hampshire.Along about midnight the outer door opened and a poor, ragged, hungry-looking young chap of twenty-two or three stepped in and walked to the stove. After he had got his hands thawed out a little he came over to the window of the telegraph office and handed the operator a piece of paper. It was just a piece of common wrapping paper with a message written on it in lead pencil.

"How much will it cost me to send that message?" he asked.

The operator counted the words.

"Ten words; twenty-five cents."

The young fellow withdrew his closed hand from his pocket and emptied out exactly twenty-five cents in pennies and nickels, sighed and went out.

The operator sat down and sent the message. Then he sat looking at the paper for quite a few seconds; then he turned to me and said,

"Well, I have been jerking lightning quite a while now, but there is the biggest ten words I ever sent."

He handed me the message; it read—

"Kiss Mother good-by; I am too poor to come."The second is just a letter which Miss Dayne received in Pittsburg, from a poor old mother who thought she recognized in Miss Dayne her erring daughter.

McKeesport, Pa., Mar. 5.

Dear Daughter Blanch.

i recognized your picture in one of the Pittsburg papers. Blanchie will you write me a few lines and releived my heart and mind. if it is concealment you dont want any one to know from me if you will only write me a few lines i am your mother how i have longed to see you my health is failing me the children often ask about you and wonder dont fail me dear child you are just the same to me as the rest love to you Blanchie from your heart broken mother

TOMMIE RYAN'S HORSE

Tommie Ryan and his wife (Mary Richfield) live in a very charming house at Sayville, Long Island. The Ryan horse lived in the barn. Although, if Mrs. Tommie had had her way, he would have lived in the parlor. For "Abner" was the pride of her heart.

Abner had been in the family so long he had become a habit. He had grown so old that Tommie had to go out at night and fold him up and put him to bed; then in the morning he would have to go out and pry him up on to his feet again.

When Mrs. Ryan wanted to go for a drive, Tommie had to go along on his bicycle, to push the horse up the hills and hold it back going down the hills.Abner's teeth had grown so long that he looked like a wild boar. Tommie vows that he chewed all his hay for him for two years.

Finally Tommie got tired of acting as wet nurse to Abner and wanted to dispose of him some way; but Mrs. Ryan absolutely refused; she said Tommie had given her that horse "to keep" and she was going to keep him.

But finally, along towards fall, when it was time for them to start out on their winter's tour, Tommie evolved a deep, dark scheme. So he framed it up with the local livery stable man, that, as soon as they were gone, he was to dispose of Abner; sell him, if he could; if not, then give him away to some one who would treat him kindly and see that his last days were spent in peace and plenty. And, in order to cover up his duplicity, he left three letters with the livery stable man to be copied and mailed to him on stated dates.

Everything went off as planned; Abner was disposed of, and upon the first stated date the Ryans received the first letter; it stated that the distemper was rather prevalent among the best circles of Long Island Horse Society, but that as yet Abner was free from it.

Two weeks later a letter came to St. Louis stating that Abner was afflicted, but very slightly.

At Milwaukee a week later the third letter came, describing in detail the last sad rites attending the death and burial of Abner.

As the weeks passed by Mrs. Ryan grew resigned and Tommie grew happy. And then came their engagement at Buffalo. Upon arrival at the theater, Tommie found eleven letters; one was from the livery stable man at home; this one he slipped into his overcoat pocket for a private reading later on. While he was reading the other ten, his turn came to rehearse his music; he slipped the ten letters into the same pocket with the livery stable man's letter, and forgot all about the whole lot.

Arriving at the hotel, Mrs. Ryan asked him for the mail and he handed the whole lot over to her. The first one that she opened was the livery stable man's. It stated that the family he had given Abner to, according to Tom's directions, had just been arrested for beating and starving Abner.

I can't tell the rest; it is too sad; but to this day, every time Mrs. Ryan thinks of Abner, she looks at Tommie, and he goes out and sits in the Park.

"Thou Shalt Not Steal," said the sign in the car.

The conductor looked at it and laughed "ha ha."

And he pinched four dollars, and whistled the air,

"None but the brave deserve the fare."

After six weeks' travel the Harry Lauder Company had reached San Francisco; every night of that six weeks Hugo Morris had taken Lauder out to some restaurant to exhibit and feed him. On this first night in San Francisco, the show had been an uncommonly large success, and "Spendthrift Harry" was feeling generous. So he said to Hugo,

"Wull, Hugo, I bane thinkin'; every nicht sen we left New York you ha' taken me oot as your guest; you ha' entertained me grand; I ha' never seen anything like it in ma own country. An' I ha come to the conclusion tha' it is not richt for me to let yo' do a' the treatin'. An' so to-nicht I wi' toss yo' a penny to see who pays for the supper."

He did so, and Hugo got stuck.

Wouldn't Alan Dale feel at home in a "Pan"tages theater?

One morning in Chicago I received a pressing invitation to come over to the police station and bail out "A Fallen Star." Upon arriving there I found the aforesaid Star sitting on the edge of his bunk holding his head in his hands and wishing it had never happened.

Like all Good Samaritans I started in delivering a Frances Murphy to him; I told him how he was ruining his health, fortune and reputation; I was really making quite a hit—with myself. Suddenly a rat scampered along the corridor by the door. The Fallen Star saw it, started, glanced sharply at me, then regained his composure. I was going ahead with my temperance lecture, when he glanced up at me a second time and said sharply,

"I know what you think; you think I think I saw a rat—but I didn't."

One summer we took our Property Man up on the farm in New Hampshire with us; one day my wife was trying to describe a man that she wanted him to find over to the village:

"He is a rather stout man," she said; "has reddish hair, wears blue glasses and has locomotor ataxia."

"Oh, yes," interrupted the Property Man, "I seen it; he keeps it up in George Blodgett's barn; I see it every night when I go after the cow."

The manager of a little theater in Des Moines closed an act on a Thursday; I asked him what the matter was with the actor:

"Too officious, front and back."

B. F. Keith had two theaters in Philadelphia; one on Eighth Street and one on Chestnut Street. One week while we were appearing at the Chestnut Street house one of the papers had a picture of me. Not having space enough for the whole name of the theater, they cut it down so that the announcement read—

"WILL M. CRESSY. KEITH'S CHESTNUT."

The train had stopped at Reno for a few minutes; it was just at dusk and as the night was warm we got out and were walking up and down the platform. There was a billboard at the end of the station and the bill poster was pasting up some paper advertising the coming of "The Widow's Mite" Company. An old chap came along, stopped and looked at it, but, owing to the poor light could not quite make out what it was; so he said to the bill poster,

"What show is it, Bill?"

"The Widow's Mite."

The old fellow pondered on it for a moment, then as he turned away he said, half to himself,

"Might? They do."

One night in San Francisco, Bonnie Thornton woke up, heard a suspicious noise in the next room, and nudged Jim, her husband.

"What's the matter?" inquired Jim.

"There is a burglar in the other room," said Bonnie.

"How do you know?"

"I can hear him."

There was a pause, then she whispered excitedly,

"Jim, he is under the bed."

"No, he isn't," said Jim.

"How do you know he isn't?"

"Because I am under there."

Jack Wilson went into an auto supply store in New York and wanted to buy a pedometer for his car.

"A speedometer you mean, don't you?" said the clerk, smiling.

"No; I want a pedometer," said Jack.

"But," persisted the clerk, "a pedometer is for registering how far you have walked. You don't want that on your car."

"Humph," said Jack, "you don't know my car."

A Critic had criticized me rather severely, and then, not satisfied with that, had come around to see me and tell wherein I was wrong.

"See here," I said, "how is it that you, a newspaper man here in a small town; a man that never wrote a play; never produced a play; and never played a part in your life; how is it that you feel competent to give lessons to me, who have made a life's study of this line of work?"

"Well," he said slowly, "it is true that I never wrote, produced or took part in a play. Neither have I ever laid an egg. But I consider myself a better judge of an omelette than any hen that ever lived."There was a kind of a R.S.V.P. in his tone but I did not have any answer to make right at the time.

It was at a little station way out on the plains of Nebraska. There were exactly sixteen houses in sight. Two men met just outside our window.

"Why, hello, Henry," said one; "what are you doin' down town?"