"I remember very little of that first performance. However, I believe I was not offensive and therefore was allowed to play the week out. The following season, not being able to come to terms with Colonel Sinn, I determined to adopt the stage as a profession and was fortunate enough to secure the juvenile part in a small company playing Daly's 'A Night Off.' Then came 'The Dark Secret,' in which the villains and myself were the only members of the company who escaped the tank." A few seasons later he was with Charles Dickson in "Incog," which came to be called in the profession "the matrimonial play," as no less than four couples met their affinities while acting therein, viz.: Charles Dickson and Lillian Burkhardt, Louis Mann and Clara Lipman, Harry Davenport and Phyllis Rankin, and Mr. Edeson and Ellen Burg. Ten years ago Mr. Edeson was in the Empire stock company, understudy to William Faversham, and making a particularly good impression when he played the latter's part in "Under the Red Robe," which ran so far into the spring that the leaders in the cast became tired out and left their parts to the next in line, Ida Conquest falling heir to Viola Allen's _Renée_. The aftermath of the Spanish-American War nearly lost Edeson to the stage, as for a time he seriously thought of going to Porto Rico as the agent for a house selling sporting goods. Luckily he changed his mind and accepted a position as leading man in the splendid cast Amelia Bingham collected for "The Climbers." This play, in the estimation of some critics, made Mr. Edeson, and in the winter of 1902 he became a star on his own account, with Augustus Thomas's dramatization of Richard Harding Davis's "Soldiers of Fortune" as the vehicle. HITCHCOCK SOLD DRY GOODS. His Original Assets Consisted of a Shirt, a Pair of Shoes, a Trunk, and Much Cheerful Impudence. The other day I happened to run across Raymond Hitchcock at lunch in the Players' Club. I reminded him of the request I had made him for material with which to enrich this department of THE SCRAP BOOK. "Yes, you'll get it," he assured me, in that rugged intonation which does so much to infuse fun into his remarks on the stage, "I spent a good hour over the typewriter yesterday, pouring into it the story of my life. May you survive the reading thereof." He had "poured" to such good purpose that not only did I survive the reading of his autobiography, but the screed itself was found worthy of survival in its original form, and I am giving it to the reader herewith. The Actor's Own Story. I came down from Auburn, New York, with twenty-five dollars in my clothes, and the "absolute certainty" that New York was clamoring for me--as I had been a hit in an amateur performance in Auburn and everybody said I "just ought to go on the stage." The twenty-five dollars was soon only a bright spot in my memory, and I found that, while I was well known in Auburn, not even the street-car drivers knew me in New York.