CHAPTER IX. STAGE CHARMS AND OMENS. The night the Southern Hotel burned down in St. Louis, I was standing at the ladies' entrance when Kate Claxton, whose presence is now always regarded in a city as ominous of a conflagration, came down through the fire and smoke in her night dress and was hurried across the street and out of danger by a gentleman who lent her his overcoat while she made her way to another hotel. There were seventeen lives lost that terrible night, and a young and beautiful actress--Frankie McLellan--in a frantic effort to escape the flames, jumped from a three story window and had her face marked for life by the fall. Just as soon as people got over the horror of the first news of the catastrophe, gossip turned to theorizing and from that diversant stories were told concerning the prominent people who figured in the calamity. Then it became known that Milton Nobles had lost a brand new pair of lavender trousers, in the pockets of which were several hundred dollars that "The Phœnix" had brought him that same evening. Then too, the narrow escape of Rose Osborne, of the Olympic stock company, was recited; but prominent above all, Miss Kate Claxton's presence in the hotel was dwelt upon, and, as she had already fairly earned the unanimous reputation that has since followed her, her name became part of the history of the conflagration, as it has been associated with every conflagration that occurred in her vicinage since. She is rather ungallantly and untruly styled the "Fire Fiend," and all sorts of predictions are made about the theatre she plays in, the hotel she has her rooms at, and the very town and county in which she is temporarily domiciled. But Kate Claxton, who by the way is Mrs. Stevenson, is not the first person in her profession to have acquired such an unenviable reputation. Thomas S. Hamblin, an actor and manager of the early half of the present century, who came from England in 1825 to star in "Shakespeare," was followed by fire even more relentlessly than Miss Claxton has been. No less than four theatres burned under his management, and it was generally said when he undertook to open or run a place of amusement that from that moment it was fated to the flames. Hamblin figures conspicuously in the history of the Bowery. He died in 1854. [Illustration: KATE CLAXTON.]