EPISODES IN VAN BIBBER'S LIFE

By
Richard Harding Davis





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