There are few favorites of the public to-day who have not fought their way to the front inch by inch, who have not sacrificed everything for their art, toiling through the day that the work of the night might show improvement--very few who have not served years of apprenticeship on the stage before the moment of success arrived. And this has been the rule always. Nell Gwynne, the fish-girl, whose beauty and bright repartee attracted the attention of Lacy, the actor, and who peddled oranges to the audience before she began to amuse them on the stage, managed without much trouble, and during a short stage experience, to win the heart of Charles II., who made her his mistress and retained her while he lived, his parting words to those around his death-bed being, "See that poor Nelly doesn't starve;" but Nelly did starve. She died in poverty and left a line of dukes to perpetuate her plebeian blood in royal veins. She died in November, 1687, in her thirty-seventh year. Lola Montez, the pretty Irish girl who in her fourteenth year eloped with one Capt. James to avoid a disagreeable marriage, accompanied him to India, where they got mutually tired of each other and returning to England studied dancing and went on the stage, was another of those fortunate and unfortunate fascinating women whose lives fade away fast and who after a brief hey-day of luxuries lie down in rags and poverty to seek a needed rest that is never broken. She won the hearts of kings, led a revolution in Poland, and finally, after being driven from her Bavarian castle where, as Countess of Lansfield she had ruled, and strutting a brief hour in London in male attire, died in this country January 17, 1861. Her ashes rest in Greenwood Cemetery, but she was saved from a pauper's grave only through the charity of some friend. During her life she had thrown away millions. Fallin, the husband of Maude Granger, is the son of the man with whom Lola Montez had her last escapade, Fallin, Sr., deserting his family in New York to accompany Lola to San Francisco. Her real name was Marie Dolores Eliza Rospanna Gilbert.