After the company had done its worst to “Richelieu,” it changed to Shakespearean repertoire, and for one year young Fairbanks engaged in what Mr. Warde was pleased to term a “catch-as-catch-can bout with the immortal Bard.”  When friends of Shakespeare finally protested in the name of humanity, the strenuous Douglas accepted an engagement with Herbert Kelcey and Effie Shannon in “Her Lord and Master.”

Five months went by before the two stars broke under the strain, and by that time news had come to Mr. Fairbanks that Wall Street was Easy Money’s other name.  Armed with his grin, he marched into the office of De Coppet & Doremus, and when the manager came out of his trance Shakespeare’s worst enemy was holding down the job of order man.

“The name Coppet appealed to me,” he explains.

He is still remembered in that office, fondly but fearfully.  He did his work well enough; in fact, there are those who insist that he invented scientific management.

“How about that?” I asked him, for it puzzled me.

“Well, you see, it was this way:  For five days in a week I would say, ‘Quite so’ to my assistant, no matter what he suggested.  On Saturday I would dash into the manager’s office, wag my head, knit my brow, and exclaim, ‘What we need around here is efficiency.’  And once I urged the purchase of a time-clock.”

The way he filled his spare time was what bothered.  What with his tumbling tricks, boxing, wrestling, leap-frog over chairs, and other small gaieties, he mussed up routine to a certain extent.  But he was not discharged.  At a point where the firm was just one jump ahead of nervous prostration, along came “Jack” Beardsley and “Little” Owen, two husky football players with a desire to see life without the safety clutch.

The three approached the officials of a cattle-steamship, and by persistent claims to the effect that they “had a way” with dumb animals, got jobs as hay stewards.

“We found the cows very nice,” comments Mr. Fairbanks.  “No one can get me to say a word against them.  But those stokers!  And those other stable-maids!  Pow!  We had to fight ’em from one end of the voyage to the other, and it got so that I bit myself in my sleep.  The three of us got eight shillings apiece when we landed at Liverpool, and tickets back, but there were several little things about Europe that bothered us, and we thought we’d see what the trouble was.”

They “hoboed” it through England, France, and Belgium, working at any old job until they gathered money enough to move along, whether it was carrying water to English navvies or unloading paving-blocks from a Seine boat.  After three joyous months, they felt the call of the cattle, and came home on another steamer.

Back on his native heath, young Fairbanks took a shot from the hip at law, but missed.  Then he got a job in a machine-manufacturing plant, but one day he found that his carelessness had permitted fifty dollars to accumulate, and he breezed down to Cuba and Yucatan to see what openings there were for capital.  Back from that tramping trip, he figured that since he had not annoyed the stage for some time it certainly owed him something.