Not long after six o'clock was it, and the lingering remnants of a very thin audience were rapidly escaping before the onslaught of the “chasers.” The particular chaser that held the stage at the moment was a tall, thin young man, rather nimble as to the legs, who was exercising a sound pair of lungs on a song, a tender memory of a certain Bridget O'Grady, who, he vowed, was a perfect lady. The fiddles squeaked and rasped, the piano tinkled, the bass viol rumbled in loudest of all; and the audience grew thinner and thinner--narrowed down, in fact, to a few questionable individuals who had, one feared, no better place to go. After the song there was a dance in which the nimble legs appeared to some advantage. And if we had been tucked away in a corner of that dirty stage, behind the wings that were slit and frayed from years of service--if we had watched the Irish vocalist when he came off and readjusted his carroty wig, we could not have failed to recognize in the possessor of the nimble legs and the sound lungs our old friend Apples. Somewhere in the course of his career Apples had dropped a stitch; for the goal of all true Thespians, the myriad-minded Shakespeare, was still only a waking dream for Apples, was still no more than a twinkling constellation that shone and shone in the far heavens, serenely unconscious that one Appleton Le Duc was striving upward. But was it not an encouragement to recall the inspiriting words of the professor of elocution, that Shakespeare himself had been a country boy; that he, too, had gone to the city to seek his fortune; that he, too, had stumbled and struggled, and climbed and climbed until he had reached the highest pinnacle of fame? Something was certainly on the mind of the rising actor to-night--something that elevated him above the dingy hall and the sleepy audience. Pausing only to mop his brow, back he went in response to his encore--the encore that was mentioned in his contract--as cheerfully as if the audience had really given him a hand; and the sound lungs burst out again, to another scraping, tinkling, rumbling accompaniment; and the voice of Apples rose high in the praise of 'Mary, my fairy, the Maid of Ochlone,' whose heart-dum-de-dumdy-dum-surely-my-own. The sight of a newspaper spread wide before the face of the only occupant of an orchestra seat could not disturb Apples this evening; the glimpse of two newsboys in the gallery, aiming with peanuts at the bald head behind the newspaper, could not so much as ruffle him; for golden-haired Mary, dee-doodle-dee-fairy, dee-iddle-dee-airy, ta raddle-my-own. Very blithe was Apples, strangely blithe for an underpaid chaser in the most despondent theatre on the North Side.