Mamma gave up right there.

“I am sending you a thousand kisses,” he wrote to his fair young wife who was spending her first month away from him.  Two days later he received the following telegram:  “Kisses received.  Landlord refuses to accept any of them on account.”  Then he woke up and forwarded a check.

See also Trouble.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS

  There was a young man of Dunbar,
  Who playfully poisoned his Ma;
    When he’d finished his work,
    He remarked with a smirk,
  “This will cause quite a family jar.”

See also Families; Marriage.

DRAMA

The average modern play calls in the first act for all our faith, in the second for all our hope, and in the last for all our charity.—­Eugene Walter.

The young man in the third row of seats looked bored.  He wasn’t having a good time.  He cared nothing for the Shakespearean drama.

“What’s the greatest play you ever saw?” the young woman asked, observing his abstraction.

Instantly he brightened.

“Tinker touching a man out between second and third and getting the ball over to Chance in time to nab the runner to first!” he said.

LARRY—­“I like Professor Whatishisname in Shakespeare.  He brings things home to you that you never saw before.”

HARRY—­“Huh!  I’ve got a laundryman as good as that.”

I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others....  To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama.—­Charlotte Cushman.

Two women were leaving the theater after a performance of “The Doll’s House.”

“Oh, don’t you love Ibsen?” asked one, ecstatically.  “Doesn’t he just take all the hope out of life?”

DRAMATIC CRITICISM

Theodore Dreiser, the novelist, was talking about criticism.

“I like pointed criticism,” he said, “criticism such as I heard in the lobby of a theater the other night at the end of the play.”

“The critic was an old gentleman.  His criticism, which was for his wife’s ears alone, consisted of these words: 

“‘Well, you would come!’”

Nat Goodwin, the American comedian, when at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, told of an experience he once had with a juvenile deadhead in a town in America.  Standing outside the theater a little time before the performance was due to begin he observed a small boy with an anxious, forlorn look on his face and a weedy-looking pup in his arms.

Goodwin inquired what was the matter, and was told that the boy wished to sell the dog so as to raise the price of a seat in the gallery.  The actor suspected at once a dodge to secure a pass on the “sympathy racket,” but allowing himself to be taken in he gave the boy a pass.  The dog was deposited in a safe place and the boy was able to watch Goodwin as the Gilded Fool from a good seat in the gallery.  Next day Goodwin saw the boy again near the theater, so he asked: