This may not be witty, and it may even not be humorous, but it was funny. It provoked incessant laughter in its progress to its apex, which was greeted with uncontrollable roars. And laughter, like that, clean and simple and honest, is a thing to be thankful for. It is what Artemus Ward called “a sweet, sweet boon.” It needs no apology and no explanation; it is its own excuse for being,—even if it resists classification. It is wholesome and hygienic; and as Henry Ward Beecher declared, “Whoever and wherever and however situated a man is, he must watch three things,—sleeping, digestion and laughing. They are three indispensable necessities.” (1919) XII THE “OLD COMEDIES” XII THE “OLD COMEDIES” I It was in 1861 that Wallack’s Theater moved uptown from Broadway and Broome Street to Broadway and 13th Street and that the management passed from the hand of James W. Wallack to that of his son, Lester Wallack. In 1882 Wallack’s Theater made another migration, from Broadway and 13th Street to Broadway and 30th Street; and in this third and final home the company failed to find itself as attractive as it had been when it was lower downtown. Lester Wallack had to relinquish its control; and he was glad to accept as a provision for his declining years the proceeds of an all-star performance of ‘Hamlet’ given for his benefit with Edwin Booth as Hamlet and with Joseph Jefferson as the First Gravedigger. It was in 1879 while the company was still in its second home, at Broadway and 13th Street, that Lester Wallack made a remark to me which helped to explain why his enterprize came to grief not long after it was transplanted to Broadway and 30th Street. He declared rather plaintively that the management of a theater in New York was in 1879 far more difficult than it had been in his father’s time. “We used to bring out the latest London success,” he told me, “and to revive the Old Comedies, and with a play now and then from Dion [Boucicault] or from John [Brougham], we got through the season very well. But I don’t really know now what people want.”