VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS By Richard Harding Davis 1892, 1920 * * * * * TO MY FATHER L. CLARKE DAVIS WHO HAS BEEN MY KINDEST AND MY SEVEREST CRITIC * * * * * CONTENTS HER FIRST APPEARANCE VAN BIBBER'S MAN-SERVANT THE HUNGRY MAN WAS FED VAN BIBBER AT THE RACES AN EXPERIMENT IN ECONOMY MR. TRAVERS'S FIRST HUNT LOVE ME, LOVE MY DOG ELEANORE CUYLER A RECRUIT AT CHRISTMAS A PATRON OF ART ANDY M'GEE'S CHORUS GIRL A LEANDER OF THE EAST RIVER HOW HEFTY BURKE GOT EVEN OUTSIDE THE PRISON AN UNFINISHED STORY * * * * * HER FIRST APPEARANCE It was at the end of the first act of the first night of "The Sultana," and every member of the Lester Comic Opera Company, from Lester himself down to the wardrobe woman's son, who would have had to work if his mother lost her place, was sick with anxiety. There is perhaps only one other place as feverish as it is behind the scenes on the first night of a comic opera, and that is a newspaper office on the last night of a Presidential campaign, when the returns are being flashed on the canvas outside, and the mob is howling, and the editor-in-chief is expecting to go to the Court of St. James if the election comes his way, and the office-boy is betting his wages that it won't. Such nights as these try men's souls; but Van Bibber passed the stage-door man with as calmly polite a nod as though the piece had been running a hundred nights, and the manager was thinking up souvenirs for the one hundred and fiftieth, and the prima donna had, as usual, began to hint for a new set of costumes. The stage-door keeper hesitated and was lost, and Van Bibber stepped into the unsuppressed excitement of the place with a pleased sniff at the familiar smell of paint and burning gas, and the dusty odor that came from the scene-lofts above. For a moment he hesitated in the cross-lights and confusion about him, failing to recognize in their new costumes his old acquaintances of the company; but he saw Kripps, the stage-manager, in the centre of the stage, perspiring and in his shirt-sleeves as always, wildly waving an arm to some one in the flies, and beckoning with the other to the gas-man in the front entrance. The stage hands were striking the scene for the first act, and fighting with the set for the second, and dragging out a canvas floor of tessellated marble, and running a throne and a practical pair of steps over it, and aiming the high quaking walls of a palace and abuse at whoever came in their way.