ferred them even in the seventies, and they introduced something new into our theater, that girly-girly appeal. They toured the country with vast success, stopping one night en route to California at Dodge City, and for years after the roof of the theater of the Cowboy Capitol leaked as a token of the audience's enthusiasm and its handiness with Colonel Colt's invention.
The Lambs included many excellent actors in the eighties, but it was far from being representative of the profession. The members were fewer than one hundred, its finances hand to mouth like those of the actor of the time, and its permanence doubtful. So when The Players was launched in 1888 by Edwin Booth, who gave his home in Gramercy Park as a clubhouse, the enormous prestige of Booth and of such men as Lawrence Barrett, Mark Twain, Joseph Jefferson, Augustin Daly, A. M. Palmer, General William Tecumseh Sherman, John Drew, Stephen H. Olin and Brander Matthews on the board of directors, shoved The Lambs back into the chorus, so to speak, for a time.
The popular conception of the actor of the day was embodied in "Ham" and "Beans", comic figures of as universal currency as Pat and Mike or Mutt and Jeff. "Ham" was a lean and
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