the most popular serio-comic actors of the modern American Stage. WARFIELD AND “THE AUCTIONEER.” The play in which Belasco elected to launch Warfield was entitled “The Auctioneer.” He had, at first, intended to write this play himself, calling it “The Only Levi.” But his time and energy were so preoccupied by labor in connection with the establishment of Miss Bates and the direction of Mrs. Carter’s career that he was unable to do so. He, therefore, employed a playwright known as Lee Arthur (Arthur Lee Kahn) to take his ideas and suggestions and weld them into dramatic form. The fabric which Arthur, in fulfilment of this employment, delivered to him was so wholly unfit for use (“an impossible thing, unworthy of production,” Belasco designated it) that he subsequently engaged the late Charles Klein to rewrite it in collaboration with Arthur, and, finally, was compelled himself to rehash and partly rectify it during rehearsals and early performances. It was first acted at the Hyperion Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut, September 9, 1901. Warfield, testifying on the subject in court, several years later, made a statement,--which, surely, may be accepted as authoritative,--regarding this piece, as originally produced, which is terse and informing: “When we began to rehearse,” he said, “we had a book filled with words. The play was a frost. _It was the biggest failure you ever heard of_, the opening night.... Mr. Belasco worked day and night upon the reconstruction of that play, from the time that he started with the rehearsals the week before we left New York [preliminary rehearsals had been conducted by Messrs. Klein and Arthur] until we came to New York and played, three weeks later.” The first performance of “The Auctioneer” in the metropolis occurred September 23, at the old Bijou Theatre, in Broadway, between Thirtieth and Thirty-first streets. The piece, as then made known, is a superficial, insubstantial one, which, however, contrives to illustrate some vicissitudes of fortune, and, in the main part, exemplifies the idea of a right philosophy in bearing them. That main part is a Jewish auctioneer, named _Simon Levi_, resident in Baxter Street, New York, and conducting an auction-room in the Five Points region. _Levi_, having inherited a modest but competent fortune, purchases a residence in a fashionable part of the city and invests the balance of his money in a Trust Company. Then, at a festival in celebration of the betrothal of his adopted daughter, a girl named _Helga_, he is apprized that his stock certificates in the Trust Company are bogus and that _Richard Eagan_, the affianced husband of [Illustration: Photograph by Pach. Belasco’s Collection. DAVID WARFIELD AS _SIMON LEVI_, IN “THE AUCTIONEER”]