Lillian Russell used to live down in the Rockaway section of Long Island, hardly outside of the New York City limits. When she played in the metropolis a special train carried her six nights in the week out to her suburban home. There were plenty of regular trains--theatre trains, in the colloquialism of the railroaders--but the prima donna would have none of them. She had acquired the private-car mania while she was on the road. So her special stood night after night in the big railroad terminal in Long Island City--a neat little acquisition for a prosperous lady. The nightly ride cost her fifty dollars to the railroad company; and the generous tips she lavished, from the engine-cab back, doubled that sum. Hardly a prosperous star, these days, but demands in the contract a fully-equipped car for the long, hard days on the road. The car has some value for advertising; its greatest value, however, lies in the maximum degree of comfort that it affords, as compared with the constant changing from one country hotel to another. Sometimes the biggest of these folk let the mania seize so tightly upon them that they go to excess. Paderewski, on his first trip to America, made a flying journey up to Poughkeepsie to bewilder the fair Vassarites. He shuddered at the thought of what he was pleased to call the provinces. He had the popular European notion of American small towns and their hostelries. Poughkeepsie has very comfortable hotels, but Paderewski would not risk them. He would not sleep in them, neither would he eat in them. A private car solved the first of these problems; the second was met by bringing two cooks and a waiter up from the New York hotel in which he was staying. He was paid $1,000 for the concert, and his travelling expenses cost him more than half that sum, which was a pretty good ratio. Still, stage folk are not in the habit of counting either ratios or their pennies, and the average prima donna would make some sacrifices at the savings-bank in order to indulge herself in this extravagant and purely American mania. The grand-opera folk indulge themselves to the limit, invariably at the expense of the beneficent _impresario_. But even this long-suffering publicist does not feel the expense so bitterly. Special trains for opera companies make splendid advertising, but they do not cost one cent more than regular transportation. For the railroads, acting under the guidance of an all-wise and all-powerful commission down at Washington, will issue, without extra cost, from sixty to one hundred tickets for the man who orders a special train at two dollars a mile. In this way the wise theatrical manager keeps his little flock segregated while _en route_, and reaps gratuitously the prestige and the advertising that ensue.