Outside of the legitimate theatres there is a large variety of places of amusement—that is, they are called places of amusement, but the fumes of vile tobacco, the odor of stale beer, the fiery breath of cheap whiskey, the sight of filthy women and filthier men, and the most excruciating and torturesome kind of music, all combine to make the resort anything but pleasant and the while the incidents that attract the visitor's attention are anything but amusing. There is, of course, no complaint of this sort to urge against the first-class variety theatres. These cater in a modest way to a low standard of intellect, but usually their programmes are chaste enough, and unless a person has an aversion to having beer spattered over his clothes by unhandy waiters while ministering to the thirsty wants of a neighbor in the same row, or objects to the attention of the gay girls who open wine in the private boxes and flirt with the people in the parquette, he will find a first-class variety show as pleasant a place as a good, long, mixed programme with the Glue Brothers in song and dance at one end, the Irish Triplets, in "select vocalisms and charming terpsichorean evolutions," in the middle, and a lugubrious sketch at the other end can make it. By some mysterious law known only to variety performers, the variety stage only about once in a century produces anything new or anything attractive. In the good old days of the ballet there was drawing power in the display of shapely limbs and the graceful music-of-motion like manner in which the girls tip-toed or pirouetted across the stage; or when the variety theatre was as much the home of spectacle as the legitimate houses pretended to be, and on the Vaudeville stage scenes were presented that belonged to the same class of labyrinthine scenery and profuse female beauty that the "Black Crook" and "The Green Huntsman" were the representatives of. When spectacles were the rage and the fencing scene in the "Black Crook" would set the boys at the top of the house wild with joy, the variety theatre had among the bright stars of its stage actors and actresses who are now among the most popular, and certainly among the heaviest money-makers, who appear in the legitimate houses.

Joe Emmett graduated from the variety theatre. Gus. Williams was a shining light on the same stage. J.C. Williamson was a variety artist. Geo. D. Knight did "Dutch business" in the minor theatres before he got to be famous as Otto. I recollect having seen Knight play Rip Van Winkle in Deagle's old variety theatre on Sixth Street, in St. Louis, and he played it well—not like Jefferson, of course, but it was his first attempt at the part, and if Jefferson did any better the first time he must not have improved very much since. This was twelve years ago. Mrs. Geo. Knight (Sophie Worrell) danced on a concert saloon stage in San Francisco. So did Lotta, and so did Mrs. Williamson. Den Thompson, whose Joshua Whitcomb is a perfect picture of the New England farmer, first tried this same character in the variety theatre, and Neil Burgess and the "Widow Bedotte" were first introduced to the public as the tail-end of a nigger-singing and specialty programme.

Those were the palmy days of the variety show before negro ministrelsy had grown to its present enormous proportions and before plays were written so as to take in a whole variety entertainment, and under the disguise of comedy or farce or burlesque foist a lot of specialty people from a first-class stage upon an intelligent audience. The musico-mirthful pieces that began to blossom forth in 1880 made a heavy demand upon the resources of the variety houses, and within a year threaten to leave them entirely at the mercy of "ham-fats," as the lower order of this kind of talent is designated. "Fun on the Bristol" and fifty more flimsy patchworks of the same kind were sailing around the country in a short time, and every "team" that had a specialty act of fifteen minutes duration wanted a play built to fit it and went around telling friends that they guessed they'd go starring next season. A great many of them did not go, but a great many others did. The worst were left behind, and the result was poor variety programmes and in consequence poor patronage for them.

I picked up a programme the other day, belonging to what was once a first-class house, and is so still in all except the standard of the performance, and found such old and worn-out features as a lightning crayon artist and a lightning change artist, both of which are so threadbare that even a ten-cent theatre wouldn't care to give them stage room. It is an easy step from this kind of thing down to the dives. The latter, as an institution, flourishes wider and pays better than places of less savory notoriety. There is such a charm to vice that even the saintly do not hesitate to linger in its neighborhood a while, and take a sniff of its pungent atmosphere. Anybody who drops into Harry Hill's place in New York, any night in the week, will see some remarkably churchy looking gentlemen standing around studying the aspect of the establishment and dwelling with melting eyes upon some of the painted faces that look up from the beer tables ranged at one side of the hall. A correspondent who visited Harry Hill's very recently, gives the following description of the place, its proprietor and its frequenters: "Harry Hill's grows bigger as its notoriety extends with years, but it never changes. It is not a bar-room, not a concert saloon, not a pretty waiter-girl establishment, and not a free-and-easy. None of these terms describe it, for it is all those things in one and at once—big second-story room, containing a bar, a theatrical stage, which can quickly be made into a prize ring, a bare space for dancing, tables, seats, a balcony, and a few so-called wine-rooms. There are always as many women as men in the place. The women are admitted by a private entrance, free. Men pass through a neglected bar-room on the ground floor at a cost of twenty-five cents. Prosperity has added a mansard roof and a clock-tower to the original structure, and Hill has taken in an adjoining building, and turned its best apartments into billiard and pool-rooms and a shooting gallery. Let us go in through the bar-room, up a winding stair and suddenly into the glare and bustle and merriment of the so-called theatre. On the stage two women are exhibiting as pugilists, with boxing-gloves, high-necked short dresses, soft, fat, bare arms, and a futile effort to look very much in earnest, and as if they did not realize how apparent it was that their greatest effort was to avoid hurting one another's breasts or bruising one another's faces.

"In the chairs around the tables are many men, and an equal number of women. The men are mainly young, and a majority seem to be country youths or store clerks. There are others evidently country men or foreigners. The women wear street-dress, hats and all. They are Americans, often of Irish or German extraction. As a rule they are not pretty, but they are quiet and mannerly. They know the cast-iron rules of the house—no loud or profane talking, no loud laughing, no quarreling, "no loving." These are printed and hang on the walls, and all who go there either know or speedily find out that the slightest breach of them results in prompt expulsion from the house. All are drinking, and many of the women are smoking big cigars or tiny cigarettes. Other women, without hats or sacques, but wearing big white aprons, serve as waiters and as bartenders.

"Harry Hill himself, a smooth-faced old man, broad, big and muscular, who shares with Lester Wallack the secret of looking twenty years younger than he is, sits at a table with a detective and a chief of police from some suburb. Hill is always there, and is ever entertaining distinguished strangers. Clergymen from the cities drop in at the rate of one a night. The women, as they come and go, stop and salute or speak with Hill. He knows them all, is kind to all, and is liked by all. He has nothing to do with them or their affairs, however, his place being merely their exchange, and their duty being merely to behave while there. The boxers bow and retire, and a young woman, who was a few minutes before at one of the tables with a broker, who was opening champagne, now faces the foot-lights in a short silk skirt, bare arms, bare head and red clogs. She sprinkles white sand on the boards from a gilt cornucopia, the music of a piano and three violins strike up, and she rattles her heels and toes through a clog dance. It is a waltz tune that she is keeping time to, and a tall young woman of extremely haughty mien and rich apparel seizes a shy and seedy little product of the pavement and whirls her round and round in the bare space on the floor. The lookers-on gather there, and a callow stripling from the country, without previous notice or formality, grasps a snubnosed, saucy-looking girl in the throng and joins the dancers.

"'Some of these girls 'as bin a-coming 'ere ten or fifteen years,' says Harry Hill, 'and looks better to-day than others which left their 'omes a 'alf year ago. Hit's hall hacordin' to 'ow they take to drink. Hif they go too farst they're sure to go too far.'

"Do they reform? Well, Mr. Hill says there are so many notions of what reform really is, that he can't say. Some of them reform and become mistresses when they get a chance, and some of them reform and return and reform again by spells. He points out one whom he calls Nellie, and says she went away and was going to lead a strictly honest life, disappeared for six months, and the other night came back again. "I kept my eye on Nellie, and, needing no introduction, seized a chance to talk with her.

"'I got married, and was as straight as a string for six months,' said she; 'but I had misfortune, and had no other way to support myself but to come back here.'

"'Husband leave you?'

"'He got caught cracking a dry goods store, and is up for two years.'"

The patrons of the variety "dives" are usually young men, clerks, salesmen, and sometimes the trusted employee of a bank or broker's office will get "mashed" upon one of the almost naked women who appear upon the stage, and will thereafter be numbered among the patrons of the resort. Those who have gone into the private boxes once and find the girls obliging enough to sit on their knees and ask them to treat will go there again if they can possibly get the fifty cents that is asked as an admission fee.

Sometimes a party of really Christian men unfamiliar with city ways will get into a variety dive by mistake, and what is more, into the boxes. The glaring sign over the front of the house which simply announces that the place is a theatre attracts them to the box-office.

"Say, Mister, what do you tax us to go in?" one of the party asks.

"Tickets are twenty-five, thirty-five and fifty cents," answers the dapper little man in the box-office who looks as if he ought to be a bar-keeper or a barber.

"Give us five of your half-a-dollar chairs," says the spokesman, throwing down his money, and they are forthwith led to seats in the private boxes, which are no more than long galleries walled in and having two or three windows to which the occupants crowd when anything interesting is going forward on the stage. As I have already said these boxes are connected by doors with the stage and the serio-comic vocalist who has a few minutes to spare will loiter in to strike somebody for a drink.

"Say, baby, can't I have a wet?" one of the female wrestlers remarks as she plumps herself down in her tights on the quivering knee of a weak little fellow who appears young enough to be fond of molasses candy yet, and throws her arms around his neck and hugs him to her flabby breast violently enough to disarrange the black curly hair he had slicked down at the barber shop just before he came in.

"A what?" he asks, trying to get his neck sufficiently released to be at least comfortable.

"A drink, darling," and she hugs him again and begins playing with a little curl over his forehead.

"Why, of course you can," is the overwhelmed young man's reply.

Now she looks fondly into his eyes and with the most affectionate expression at her command asks: "And how about my partner, baby. Can't she have a drink?"

"I suppose so," responds the victim; and there is a loud shouting at the stage-door for "Ida," or somebody else, and Ida, knowing what she is wanted for, hurries to the spot. In the meantime "Johnnie," the waiter, has been summoned.

"Give me a port wine sangaree," says Ida's partner.

"And give me a stone fence" (cider and brandy), says Ida.

"And what are you going to drink, baby?" the wrestler sitting on his knee asks.

"Give me glass of beer," says the "baby," in a tone sufficiently disconsolate to suggest that he was afraid he might not have enough money to pay for the treat.

One night a party of saintly looking grangers from Indiana,—five of them,—who appeared as if they were a delegation to some sort of a religious convention, got into a Bowery dive by some mistake, but made no mistake in remaining there. They got in early and it was late when they left. The whole thing appeared novel, startling to them. They had never before seen so much unstripped womanhood exposed to the naked eye. They hired a cheap opera-glass from the peanut boy, and they bought "pop" the whole night long. During the first part, when all the girls and the "nigger" end-men sit in a circle and sing dismal songs and deal out smutty jokes, the grangers were in a perfect ecstasy of wonder and admiration for the shortness of the women's dresses and the symmetry of their padded limbs; but when the first part was over and a serio-comic singer came tripping out upon the stage without any dress at all on—nothing but a bodice, trunks and flesh-colored tights—and sang "Tickled Him Under the Chin," they were in a frenzy and did not know what to do with their hands, or how to sit still, because the singer kept throwing glances in the direction of their box. Then came the supreme exaltation of their feelings; the serio-comic danced over to the box as she sang, and actually tickled the most clerical member of the quintette on his fat, white chin, while the four others looked on in astonishment, and the audience fairly howled.

The grangers were "guyed" pitilessly by the audience, but they paid little, if any, attention to it. As soon as the serio-comic had done her "turn" she rushed for their box, and before long the five Hoosiers were as happy as the lark when it trills its song to the morning.

The "dive" audiences are mixed in their character, as has been already suggested, and the proximity of a well-dressed young man to a crowd of hoodlums in jeans pants and braided coats often precipitates a row. Scarcely a night passes in the flash variety shows that there is not some trouble. A "bouncer" is connected with each establishment, whose business it should be to quell disturbances, but who, like hot-headed Irish policemen, do more towards increasing the dimensions of a row than forty other men could do. It is bad policy to attempt open criticism of the performers or performance in one of these dens. A hiss will attract the attention of the bouncer, who will come down to the sibilant offender and say:—

"Young man, do ye expect us to give ye Sary Burnhart an' Fannie Divenpoort and Ed'in Booth fur twinty-five sints. Af ye don't loike the show lave it, but af ye open yer mug ag'in, or say so much as 'Boo,' I'll put ye fwhere ye'll have plinty toime to cool yersel' aff."

If the offender dares to argue the point the "bouncer" will catch him by the neck, and then a struggle ensues, canes are flourished, the audience rise to their feet, some of the girls run in fright from the stage, and there is pandemonium in the place for ten or fifteen minutes, by the end of which time the "bouncer" has taken his man out, and returning to business, triumphantly answers a question as to the whereabouts of the hisser:—

"Oh, I left him lyin' out there in the gutther where the collar 'll come along an' get 'im."

Occasionally there will be an incident of a more dangerous kind, but tinged slightly with romance. It is related that a cowboy went into a variety show in Marshal, Texas, one night and made quite a scene. His "mash" was a "chair sweater" in the show. Entering the place one night considerably under the influence of brine, he called to his love in stentorian tones:—

"Mary, get your duds on and come with me."

"Sh-h-h!" said Mary.

"Sh-h, nothing," was the lover's response. "You jest tog up quicker'n h—, or I'll douse these glims." "I'll be through in an hour," urged Mary pacifically.

"This show'll be out sooner than that," was the cowboy's answer, as he pulled his barker and began shooting the tips off the side lights. He had just emptied his "weapin" and was about loading up again, when the frightened audience was reassured by the stage manager stepping on the stage and saying, "Mary, you are excused for the remainder of the evening. Go dress right away."

A "chair sweater," or "stuffer" as she is called out West, is a girl who sits in the first part, and who has nothing else to do than wear skirts short enough to display her limbs, and join in the choruses if she can do so without knocking the life out of the selection. After the first part she sits in the boxes and "works" the boys for drinks. If she can't make anything in the boxes she goes out into the audience—in the lowest of these dens—and flits from one place to another getting a drink here, and by that time "spotting" somebody over there whom she esteems worthy of "striking." She keeps this up all night, until the after-piece—the cancan, or whatever else it may be—is reached, when she goes behind the scenes and appears on the stage in the same street costume she has worn out in the audience. The "chair sweater's" lot is not a happy one. While pursuing her sudorific vocation she innocently imagines that she is making an actress out of herself, and I guess she is—a "dive" actress.

Now and then the "chair sweater" combines her own business with that of her employer by selling her own or other photographs to "grays." Some of these pictures are of the vilest kind, but they sell readily to the patrons of the "dive," and as the sale is effected quietly, even an honest granger now and then buys one, "just to show 'em up around the grocery."

The variety "dive" usually closes its performance with a fiery and untamed cancan, all the people of the company joining in the dance, the men usually in the character costumes and "make-up" in which they have appeared before in their sketches or acts.

Then follow the orgies behind the scenes. Sometimes it is a wine supper with champagne from the bar of the house flowing so freely that the undressed divinities do not hesitate to empty bottle after bottle over their heads as if they were Roman candles, thereby giving the assemblage a shower of Mumm's Extra Dry; or perhaps they will shampoo the swelled head of one of the gentlemen.

In the wine-room, which is an adjunct of all these houses, and which is a place that affords seclusion to those who want to be out of the way of meeting friends or attracting the notice of strangers, many extraordinary exploits are to be witnessed. Plenty of drink, however, is necessary to stimulate the fun, and when the girls got an old victim into their clutches they "play" him so nicely that he believes the whole lot of them are in love with him, and every few minutes comes the cry, "Let's have another bottle," and they have it. They sit on his lap or play circus riding on his shoulders, and until the last bottle has come, and the victim has run dry of funds they keep him in good humor; then they show him the door, coldly say "Ta, ta! Baldy," and laugh heartily at his verdant innocence as he staggers away.

The man who allows any of these women—these cancan dancers or "chair sweaters"—to entice him to their home is lost. If he has money and they know it they will not take him to their home, but to some lodging-house with the proprietor of which the cancan dancer is acquainted, and whom she knows she can trust. A pitcher of beer and a bit of drugging for the victim's glass does the business. While she is stroking his beard and kissing the end of his nose the drug is flowing gently into the goblet of beer. They drink, and in a short time the soporific has its effect, and the slumbering man is relieved of his valuables and cash. He appeals to the police, and they promise to do something for him, but they don't. He sees the cancan dancer again the next night but she knows nothing about it. The proprietor of the lodging-house is dumb as an oyster. All the victim can do is to balance the account by putting experience on the debit side of the ledger and damphoolishness on the other.

In New York the Bowery is the great place for these dives. There are any number of them, and the Bowery actress who is brazen enough to smoke her cigarettes in the street, especially when she is "on a lark," may be distinguished by the boldness of her face and the almost masculine atmosphere that surrounds her. She seems to care for nobody and nothing except her small dog and the loafer who spends her money, and looks upon herself as the equal of the best woman in the profession.

The boy theatres which flourish in all large cities, and which are dirty, dingy miniature places with gallery and pit, and six by nine stages upon which the goriest of blood-curdling dramas are enacted, have a variety phase to them, specialty performers preceding the dramatic representations, and half-nude women mingling and drinking with beardless youths in the boxes.

The concert saloon, as some of the low places that have a fat German with pink-spotted shirt and stove-pipe hat playing the piano, while a chap that has the outward appearance of a speculative philosopher is blowing a cyclone through a cracked cornet, is called, has its attractions for many; and if there are ladies to eke out the entertainment by squeezing discord out of an accordeon with flute obligato of an ear-piercing and peace-destroying kind—or, in fact, if there are any female musicians on the grounds, the proprietor of the establishment may count on liberal patronage. The female orchestras to be found in the Bowery, New York, where a squad of pretty girls all dressed in white, with a female leader wielding the baton with as much nerve as if she were old Arditi himself, are irresistible attractions to those whose tastes lead them to lager beer, and who like to partake of the beverage particularly in pleasant surroundings. A person does not get very much beer, but he hears a great deal of wild music, and unless he is over-sensitive he will forgive the music and forget the beer—if he can. It is but a few years since that the keeper of a beer garden first introduced these institutions into American life. His venture proved so successful that imitators sprang up all along the Bowery. The tenements of the East Side were explored, and every female who could torture the neighbors with an accordeon, scrape the catgut or bang the piano was enlisted in the grand scheme of catering to the musical tastes of Gotham's beer drinkers.

"Over the Rhine," in Cincinnati, is a great place for cheap and vicious amusements. A correspondent writing from there says: "The places of amusement "Over the Rhine" line Vine Street for half a dozen blocks. They are of the democratic and, with one exception, rude order, more familiar to the backwoods than to the civilization east of the Mississippi. Some are large establishments with all the fittings of an East Side variety theatre. Others are mere halls with a limited stage at one end. To some an admission is charged, ranging from ten cents up to twenty-five cents, but most of them are free. The performers include many familiar stars of the variety stage, for the salaries paid are of the best. The performances, though vulgar, are clean enough. The drinks pay all expenses, of course. Beer is served throughout the house and smoking is perpetually in order. In most places there is a gallery of boxes where the young women from the stage mingle with such of the audience as, by their generosity, deserve such honor. These are "stuffers," or as they call them here "chair warmers." One of them has conquered the soul of a local critic and he is actually puffing her into prominence in her peculiar line through the columns of one of the leading papers."