rings, the curtain rises, and the happy people before and behind the Christmas curtain meet." CHAPTER XXVIII. VARIETY DIVES AND CONCERT SALOONS. Outside of the legitimate theatres there is a large variety of places of amusement--that is, they are called places of amusement, but the fumes of vile tobacco, the odor of stale beer, the fiery breath of cheap whiskey, the sight of filthy women and filthier men, and the most excruciating and torturesome kind of music, all combine to make the resort anything but pleasant and the while the incidents that attract the visitor's attention are anything but amusing. There is, of course, no complaint of this sort to urge against the first-class variety theatres. These cater in a modest way to a low standard of intellect, but usually their programmes are chaste enough, and unless a person has an aversion to having beer spattered over his clothes by unhandy waiters while ministering to the thirsty wants of a neighbor in the same row, or objects to the attention of the gay girls who open wine in the private boxes and flirt with the people in the parquette, he will find a first-class variety show as pleasant a place as a good, long, mixed programme with the Glue Brothers in song and dance at one end, the Irish Triplets, in "select vocalisms and charming terpsichorean evolutions," in the middle, and a lugubrious sketch at the other end can make it. By some mysterious law known only to variety performers, the variety stage only about once in a century produces anything new or anything attractive. In the good old days of the ballet there was drawing power in the display of shapely limbs and the graceful music-of-motion like manner in which the girls tip-toed or pirouetted across the stage; or when the variety theatre was as much the home of spectacle as the legitimate houses pretended to be, and on the Vaudeville stage scenes were presented that belonged to the same class of labyrinthine scenery and profuse female beauty that the "Black Crook" and "The Green Huntsman" were the representatives of. When spectacles were the rage and the fencing scene in the "Black Crook" would set the boys at the top of the house wild with joy, the variety theatre had among the bright stars of its stage actors and actresses who are now among the most popular, and certainly among the heaviest money-makers, who appear in the legitimate houses. [Illustration: FENCING SCENE IN BLACK CROOK.]