The most popular theatre in America, according to the advertisements, where nothing was played but the "continuous," was packed from parquet to top gallery with a perspiring crowd of pleasure-seekers one hot August night. The papers had said--_via_ the society columns, of course--that everybody was out of town for the summer, and incidentally, therefore, that all the ordinary places of amusement were closed, except _Les Variétés_. However, the city was not quite deserted; for, of the anchored ninety-nine hundredths of the population, all who could do so, apparently in despair of other amusement, and attracted by the popular prices, had crowded into "the home of refined vaudeville," as it was called on the programme. The house was fluttering with fans; most of the spectators and actors felt as though they were slowly deliquescing in perspiration, but, on the whole, the audience seemed to be enjoying it. The usual _mélange_--how natural and appropriate it seems to use French words when treating of the vaudeville!--of entertainments entirely suited even to a Mrs. Boffin, become a world-wide type of matronly modesty and virtue--had been provided by the high-minded and scrutinizing management. Ladies in short skirts capered nimbly over the stage to the "lascivious pleasing" of the banjo; gentlemen with one leg rode marvellously endowed bicycles in impossible ways; tumblers frisked and frolicked about without the slightest regard either for temperature or gravitation; happy tramps,--at least the announcements said they were happy,--whose airy, carefully tattered garments were in entire consonance with the heated atmosphere, delivered themselves of speeches full of rare old humor and fairly bristling with Boeotian witticisms. There were men singers and women singers, musical cranks, freak piano-players, monologue artists, burlesquers, and then a little play,--at least they said it was a play. So with these multifarious stirrers-up-of-varied-emotions the evening drew toward its close. Finally, just before the biograph went through its eye-shattering, soul-distressing performance, the little boy who walked solemnly across the stage before each turn with such a queer, self-important strut that the regular patrons--those who came early and brought their luncheon--felt disappointed when he took a vacation, set out upon the racks, provided on either side of the proscenium arch for the purpose, a tablet bearing the name "Mademoiselle Hélène." When the curtain rose thereafter the stage was set for a woodland. The lights were turned thrillingly low, so that the expectant audience were scarcely aware how the tiny little body, whom they saw standing in the full blaze of the calcium-light ray suddenly flashed upon her from the mysterious apparatus in the balcony, had reached the centre of the stage.