"I kept my eye on Nellie, and, needing no introduction, seized a chance to talk with her. "'I got married, and was as straight as a string for six months,' said she; 'but I had misfortune, and had no other way to support myself but to come back here.' "'Husband leave you?' "'He got caught cracking a dry goods store, and is up for two years.'" The patrons of the variety "dives" are usually young men, clerks, salesmen, and sometimes the trusted employee of a bank or broker's office will get "mashed" upon one of the almost naked women who appear upon the stage, and will thereafter be numbered among the patrons of the resort. Those who have gone into the private boxes once and find the girls obliging enough to sit on their knees and ask them to treat will go there again if they can possibly get the fifty cents that is asked as an admission fee. Sometimes a party of really Christian men unfamiliar with city ways will get into a variety dive by mistake, and what is more, into the boxes. The glaring sign over the front of the house which simply announces that the place is a theatre attracts them to the box-office. "Say, Mister, what do you tax us to go in?" one of the party asks. "Tickets are twenty-five, thirty-five and fifty cents," answers the dapper little man in the box-office who looks as if he ought to be a bar-keeper or a barber. "Give us five of your half-a-dollar chairs," says the spokesman, throwing down his money, and they are forthwith led to seats in the private boxes, which are no more than long galleries walled in and having two or three windows to which the occupants crowd when anything interesting is going forward on the stage. As I have already said these boxes are connected by doors with the stage and the serio-comic vocalist who has a few minutes to spare will loiter in to strike somebody for a drink. "Say, baby, can't I have a wet?" one of the female wrestlers remarks as she plumps herself down in her tights on the quivering knee of a weak little fellow who appears young enough to be fond of molasses candy yet, and throws her arms around his neck and hugs him to her flabby breast violently enough to disarrange the black curly hair he had slicked down at the barber shop just before he came in. "A what?" he asks, trying to get his neck sufficiently released to be at least comfortable. "A drink, darling," and she hugs him again and begins playing with a little curl over his forehead. "Why, of course you can," is the overwhelmed young man's reply. Now she looks fondly into his eyes and with the most affectionate expression at her command asks: "And how about my partner, baby. Can't she have a drink?" "I suppose so," responds the victim; and there is a loud shouting at the stage-door for "Ida," or somebody else, and Ida, knowing what she is wanted for, hurries to the spot. In the meantime "Johnnie," the waiter, has been summoned. "Give me a port wine sangaree," says Ida's partner.