Where is our once charming acrobat--our minstrel of muscular music? What has become of these groups of fascinating people gotten up in silk and spangle? Who may the evil genius be who has taken them and their fascinating art from our stage, who the ogre of taste that has dispensed with them and their charm? How seldom it is in these times that one encounters them, as formerly when they were so much the charming part of our lighter entertainment. What are they doing since popular and fickle notions have removed them from our midst? It is two years since I have seen the American stage. I used to say to myself in other countries, at least America is the home of real variety and the real lover of the acrobat. But I hear no one saying much for him these days, and for his charming type of art. What has become of them all, the graceful little lady of the slack wire, those charming and lovely figures that undulate upon the air by means of the simple trapeze, those fascinating ensembles and all the various types of melodic muscular virtuosity? We have been given much, of late, of that virtuosity of foot and leg which is usually called dancing; and that is excellent among us here, quite the contribution of the American, so singularly the product of this special physique. Sometimes I think there are no other dancers but Americans. It used to be so delightful a diversion watching our acrobat and his group with their strong and graceful bodies writhing with rhythmical certitude over a bar or upon a trapeze against a happily colored space. Now we get little more in the field of acrobatics beyond a varied buck and wing; everything seems tuxedoed for drawing room purposes. We get no more than a decent handspring or two, an over-elaborated form of split. It all seems to be over with our once so fashionable acrobat. There is no end of good stepping, as witness the Cohan Revue, a dancing team in Robinson Crusoe, Jr., and "Archie and Bertie" (I think they call themselves). This in itself might be called the modern American school: the elongated and elastic gentleman who finds his co-operator among the thin ones of his race, artistically speaking. I did not get to the circus this year, much to my regret; perhaps I would have found my lost genius there, among the animals disporting themselves in less charitable places. But we cannot follow the circus naturally, and these minstrel folk are disappearing rapidly. Variety seems quite to have given them up and replaced them with often very tiresome and mediocre acts of singing.