Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses.
One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded the man.

"There was a story about that chap a month or two ago," said the
reporter. "They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was
to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to like
the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I'm working on
a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the
details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned
in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't
seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could
make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the
details."

After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts
over the Würzburger.

"I see no reason," said I, when he had concluded, "why that shouldn't
make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn't have acted
in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in
a real theatre. I'm really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow,
and all the players men and women. 'The thing's the play,' is the way I
quote Mr. Shakespeare."

"Try it," said the reporter.

"I will," said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a
humorous column of it for his paper.

There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there has
been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions and
stationery are sold.

One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the
store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was
married to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen,
and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the
headlines of a "Wholesale Female Murderess" story from Butte, Mont. But
after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized
your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as
one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west side.

Frank Barry and John Delaney were "prominent" young beaux of the same
side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every
time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats and
fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up in
the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen's hand. When Frank
won, John shook his hand and congratulated him--honestly, he did.

After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat.