If the hero was extremely poor, it was possible for her to be extremely wealthy, but by far the safest bet was to make her the daughter of an honest working man. In these days the young girls who went to the popular-priced theaters were not themselves employed to any extent as clerks or stenographers, and they knew more about factory life and the experience of the day laborer and less about the white collar workers than they know to-day. Our heroine must be pure at any cost, or else she must die. There could be no temporizing with the “the wages of sin are death” slogan. In all my experience I never once saw it successfully defied. The heroine must, of course, always marry the hero. Our audiences would not stand for any but a happy ending with love and wealth bestowed upon the girl. This was bad art, but it always seemed to me to be pretty good sense, as the theater to them meant not life as it was but life as they wanted it to be, and the young girl in our audiences who thrilled for an hour over the wealth and luxury and the ideal love that always came to the fictitious character she had for a time exchanged places with had little chance of remaining in this fairyland for long. 3. THE HEAVY MAN. Always wealthy; the silk hat was his badge of office. In a good melodrama he never reformed, he bit the dust. He was the most absurd thing connected with these old plays. The necessity for his evil plotting was so great that even the most innocent of audiences must have frequently wondered why he was not poisoned at an early age by his own unfortunate disposition. As a matter of fact, one of the principal causes of the death of this form of entertainment was the “Desperate Desmond” cartoons that instructed our public in the absurdity of this stock character. 4. THE HEAVY WOMAN. There were two of her, the haughty lady of wealth and social position, quite naturally the instinctive enemy of our audiences, and the “bad woman” who in these days was spoken of in a hushed whisper. I recall some successful heavy women who had dark hair, but these were always cast in the society women parts. The real bad ones had to be blondes and they averaged a good hundred and sixty pounds. 5. THE SOUBRETTE. A working girl with bad manners and a good heart. Laurette Taylor was one of the best of these I ever saw. This type of part, the real soubrette, has disappeared from our theater, and yet some of the best actresses I have ever known were soubrettes,—Maggie Mitchell, Minnie Palmer, Mrs. Fiske (when she was Minnie Maddern) and a host of others. 6. THE COMEDIAN. Either Jew, Irish or German, the most important member of the company in the old days and the one who drew the largest salary. We might and, as a matter of fact, we frequently did get away with a terrible leading man, but the comedian had to be good. 7. THE LIGHT COMEDY BOY.