a golden pleasure, and it has become a precious memory.

MISS ADA REHAN AS VIOLA IN "TWELFTH NIGHT"

and Miss Neilson's 'iola was affluent in pretty bravado and demonstrative glee. The mock ruefulness and bubbling merriment with which she delivered the speech culminating with "I am the man!" were delicious both as an outburst of humor and a dramatic effect. The speech beginning, "Make me a willow cabin at your gate," was spoken in a kind of ecstasy, and it flowed from her lips in perfect music. The sad significance of her tones when she said, "I am all the daughters of my father's house," went directly to the heart, and her pause after "and all the brothers, too," with then a quick transition to the business in hand ("Sir, shall I to this lady?"), were wonderfully pathetic and expressive. I have somewhere read that Dora Jordan excelled in a similar treatment of the latter passage; but Adelaide Neilson was not a searcher for precedents or models. She studied, and she owed much to her diligence in study; but her intuitions were unerring, and she owed much more to them. She fully comprehended Viola, and she merged herself in the part. The performance was

ADA REHAN

THE excellent performance of Viola by Ada Rehan is not so distant that it has passed entirely from the public remembrance, though perhaps it is not as distinctly remembered as her matchless Rosalind is or her brilliant Katharina. She acted Viola for the first time on February 21, 1893, at Daly's Theater, when "Twelfth Night" was revived by Augustin Daly in the most sumptuous setting ever provided for it and with an exceptionally strong cast. Long before she joined Daly's company she had played in this comedy with Adelaide Neilson, and had become acquainted with the method. of that actress in the treatment of Viola, and in assuming this character she wisely and rightly followed to some extent that excellent model, which she admired and could not forget. The spirit of her personation was the same, combining deep tenderness of feeling with glittering gaiety of demeanor, but the form of it was more massive, and the execution more phatic. Her Viola was less a dreamer and more an executant than that of Miss Neilson. Her repulse of Malvolio ("No, good swabber, I am to hull here a little longer") struck a defiant note and exhibited an airy truculence. A little of the temperament of Rosalind was infused into that of 'iola. When she said, "I am all the daughters of my father's house," her manner and the despairing sadness of her tone almost revealed her sex to the Duke, and, as Orsino turned toward her with a look of mingled surprise and inquiry, she, rapidly, confusedly, and also comically, added, "a-a-and all the brothers, too!" thus obtaining a laugh instead of a tear.

em

Those touches, slight, but significant, indicated that the actress had formed her own ideal of the part, and intended her personation to be in no wise deficient of the glitter of comedy. It was a performance not less brilliant than gentle. salient qualities were poetic condition, physical beauty, innate refinement, and ardent feeling artfully restrained. In this Viola's replies to Orsino's questions about Cesario's love ("of your complexion,"

Its

"about your years, my lord") there was a delicious blending of roguishness and wistfulness. While listening to the song, "O Mistress Mine" (which in Daly's stage version of the comedy was sung for Orsino, instead of Come away, Death"), she sat at the foot of the couch on which the love-lorn Duke was reclining, and at "Journeys end in lovers' meeting" she slowly turned her head toward that entranced sentimentalist, and bent her gaze upon him, with an expression of fond, almost abject, longing, touchingly indicative of perfect love. This was a beautiful use of art, but the supreme beauty of the performance was its manifestation of the magnanimity which makes the character so noble as well as so lovely-Viola's generous, gentle, sympathetic consideration for Olivia, the woman beloved by the man to whom she is herself devoted. In Ada Rehan's denotement of that feature there was a felicity all her own.

COSTUME, TIME, AND PLACE

IN the opening scene (Daly's version), the sea-coast, Ada Rehan's Viola wore a loose, flowing white robe, trimmed with gold-colored fringe, not a well-chosen garment, because it augmented the size of a person who, though large, was one of the most beautifully formed and proportioned women ever seen on the stage. In Viola's first scene with Orsino, and until the end of the second act, she wore a costume of delicate purple color, silk tights, and shoes; her doublet, heavily embroidered with gold, was open at the throat, where it was edged with white. Her garb was completed by a silk sash, fringed with gold, and a small, plumed cap. In the third and fourth acts (Daly's version of the play was condensed into four, and as finally performed it omitted the dungeon scene) she wore a costume of similar design, of delicate, light-green color, and provided also with a short, arm-hole cloak of ribbed, light-brown velvet. Adelaide Neilson's dress was Grecian in fashion, the prevailing colors being blue and silver. Ada Rehan's dress was Italian. The place of "Twelfth Night" is-anywhere the imagination pleases. Illyria, 167 B.C., was a Roman province; in 1600, absorbed in Dalmatia, it was under Venetian rule. The dressing of the comedy.

pany, was remarkable for elegance of demeanor and refinement of artistic style: both were accomplished comedians, and both were distinguished as 'iola. Mrs. Scott-Siddons, whom Augustin Daly brought forward as l'iola in the autumn of 1869, was measurably effective in her exhibition of the mingled consternation and arch enjoyment with which, in the disguise of Cesario, she perceives the perplexity of "poor Olivia" ("I am the man!"). But she was more notable as a handsome woman than as a thorough artist. She was descended from the illustrious Mrs. Siddons, and Fanny Kemble, that renowned woman's niece, said

that

from which she landed on the shore of Illyria. In l'iola's chief scene with Orsino she sang, to a harp accompaniment, the melancholy song, "Come away, Death," which by Shakspere is assigned to the Fool.

Viola Allen, who acted the part amid deleterious surroundings, being hampered by association with a wooden Orsino, an inane Sebastian, a coarse and tiresome Sir Toby, and an impossible Malvolio, though aptly fitted for it by superiority of mind,

l'iola overweighted the part and made it heavy. Marie Wainwright was a pretty l'iola, agreeable in her roguishness and amusing in her assumption of "a swashing and a martial outside," but deficient of the requisite show of feeling.

Helena Modjeska, a great great actress, while beautiful to the vision as l'iola (her page dress was particularly rich in material and embellishment), neither aroused the imagination nor touched the heart. Her occasional air of rueful perplexity and sweet bewilderment was very winning, but she required a stronger character and wilder passions than appertain to the part. A peculiarity of her stage business was that she made her first entrance in a boat,

sensibility of temperament, personal beauty, and proficient artistic skill, used a prosaic rather than a poetical method, sacrificing loveliness of quality and sympathy of effect in a mistaken endeavor to invest a creature of ethereal delicacy, the Egeria of a poet's imagination, with an atmosphere of realism, the literal life of every day.

The most correct and effective embodiment of l'iola now before the American public is that given by Julia Marlowe, whose romantic facial aspect suits with the

character, and whose art is so judicious and under such admirable control that she can create the illusion of truth without sacrificing the charm of poetry. l'iola is a perfect ideal of beauty, and such an ideal, suitably presented on the stage, sinks into the mind, remains in the memory, and beneficently influences the conduct of life. In the charm of that ideal, intertwined as it is with scenes of merriment, which should never be made gross, and with a salutary rebuke of one of the worst of human frailties, -the love of self,-consists the abiding worth of "Twelfth Night," a comedy which will be valued as long as the world continues to value Shakspere on the stage.

IEN I called on my friend ReyWH Whelds not long since, I found him

nolds not long since, I found him just clearing up his desk for a trip out of town to inspect one of his steam-shovels, a new model, which he had lately set at work on the new line of the Wisconsin Southern, near Blackwater. He invited me to go with him. I had been ill, and the trip, he said, would do me good.

I remembered Blackwater well-one of those tranquil little towns, so soothing to city eyes, seen like a picture in the distance, with spires pointing heavenward, sleeping among the green farms; but within unquiet, ambitious to boom, to hustle, to make a noise, to paint its everlasting tranquil blue sky with the black factory-smoke of real prosperity. years the local prophets and wise men had predicted the new railway which was to bring this about. Now at last it was coming. The little town was as bustling and joyous as a June ant-hill after a late spring and a long winter.

For

We found the steam-shovel, a huge affair, with enormous boom strutting heavenward, at work in the side of one of those great bluffs that bestrew our southern Wisconsin country, the green reminders, geologists tell us, of ancient glaciers. And looking down upon it from the upper edge of the great pit it had dug, stood the figure of a little old woman, leaning upon a hoe.

She was dressed in rusty black, and her gray hair crept out beneath the edge of an odd, foreign-looking black cap. The wind had blown her dress a little into disorder, and fluttered loose wisps of her hair about her face, giving her an appearance of wildness. Yet there was something about her that looked familiar.

Reynolds gave her no heed. He was intent upon his steam-shovel.

There is something formidable about one of those huge machines, with its rhinoceros snout, roaring and wallowing and snorting at the bottom of the great pit it