While out at the Elko studio Charlie Winninger, with all his brilliant and sustaining background, had so disastrously flopped, at Mack Sennett’s studio another Charlie was very busy thinking out stunts that would make people laugh. For the more people laughed, the more dollars could Charlie Chaplin add to the savings for the rainy day, against which, if he ever got the chance, he would make himself fool-proof. For, so I have been told, Charlie Chaplin had known rainy days even when a youngster. He was only seven when, in a music-hall sketch, he made his first theatrical appearance. Later, he toured for some time through the United Kingdom as one of the “Eight Lancashire Lads.” There was an engagement with “Sherlock Holmes,” and then the association with Fred Karno in “The Mumming Birds.” To America with Mr. Karno he came, appearing as _Charlot_ in the now famous “A Night in an English Music-hall.” When he debarked he was far from being the richest man on the boat. The movies claimed him. He was discovered by Mack Sennett in this way. Mr. Sennett at this time was busy on the lot out in Los Angeles. He heard of a funny man in an act called “A Night in an English Music-hall” playing at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, which used to stand at Broadway and Forty-second Street, now replaced by the Rialto Motion Picture House. Mr. Adam Kessel and Mr. Bauman, the firm for whom Mack Sennett had nightly warmed the Alexandria’s leather benches in the hope of landing a job, and for whom he was now producing comedies, were both in California, and so in September, 1913, a wire was sent to Charles Kessel, brother of Adam, to go over to Hammerstein’s and get a report on the comedian about whom Mr. Sennett was so anxious. Mr. Charles Kessel, the secretary of the company, heartily approved of the comedian, who was none other than Charlie Chaplin. He thought so well of him that he sent a letter asking Chaplin to come in and see him. This Mr. Chaplin did. Mr. Kessel asked him how’d he like to go into moving pictures. Mr. Chaplin answered that he had never given them any thought. Said Mr. Kessel: “I’ve seen you act and like you, but you needn’t make any assertions now, nor any answers, but go out and make inquiries as to Kessel and Bauman and if you think well enough of them, well then we’ll talk.” Mr. Chaplin found out that the firm was O. K. So Mr. Kessel said: “I’ll give you a contract for a year and gamble with you--I’ll give you the same salary that you’re getting on the stage.” “One hundred and fifty dollars,” said Mr. Chaplin quickly. He really was getting sixty dollars. “All right,” said Mr. Kessel so quickly that Charles as quickly swallowed his Adam’s apple, and regretted he hadn’t said more. “But I don’t think I care to change from the stage to the pictures.” “Well, our contracts are for fifty-two weeks, no Sunday work, no intermissions between pictures; in vaudeville you get thirty-two weeks and you pay your own traveling expenses.”