His innumerable companies were as children to him; he chided them as children, soothed them, forgave them, and certainly loved them as children. He exulted in those who became great names in that world and gave them beautiful toys to play with; but, great as was their devotion to him, it is not they who will miss him most, but rather the far greater number who never "made a hit," but set off like the rest to do it and fell by the way. He was of so sympathetic a nature, he understood so well the dismalness to them of being "failures," that he saw them as children with their knuckles to their eyes, and then he sat back cross-legged on his chair with his knuckles, as it were, to his eyes, and life had lost its flavor for him until he invented a scheme for giving them another chance. * * * Authors of to-day sometimes discuss with one another what great writer of the past they would like most to spend an evening with if the shades were willing to respond, and I believe (and hope) that the choice most often falls on Johnson or Charles Lamb. Lamb was fond of the theater, and I think, of all those connected with it that I have known, Mr. Frohman is the one with whom he would most have liked to spend an evening. Not because of Mr. Frohman's ability, though he had the biggest brain I have met with on the stage, but because of his humor and charity and gentle chivalry and his most romantic mind. One can conceive him as often, sitting at ease, far back in his chair, cross-legged, occasionally ringing for another ice, for he was so partial to sweets that he could never get them sweet enough, and sometimes he mixed two in the hope that this would make them sweeter. I hear him telling stories of the stage as only he could tell them, rising now and roaming the floor as he shows how the lady of the play receives the declaration, and perhaps forgetting that you are the author of the play and telling you the whole story of it with superb gesture and gleaming eyes. Then back again cross-legged to the chair. What an essay Elia might have made of that night, none of it about the stories told, all about the man in the chair, the humorous, gentle, roughly educated, very fine American gentleman in the chair! J. M. BARRIE. LONDON, 1915. _Charles Frohman_ I A CHILD AMID THE THEATER One evening, toward the close of the 'sixties, a plump, rosy-cheeked lad in his eighth year stood enthralled in the gallery of the old Niblo's Garden down on lower Broadway in New York. Far below him on the stage "The Black Crook"--the extravaganza that held all New York--unfolded itself in fascinating glitter and feminine loveliness. Deaf to his brother's entreaties to leave, and risking a parental scolding and worse, the boy remained transfixed until the final curtain. When he reached home he was not in the least disturbed by the uproar his absence had caused. Quite the contrary. His face beamed, his eyes shone. All he could say was: "I have seen a play. It's wonderful!"