six hours farther across the desert, on Saturday; followed by Logan, Pocatello and Idaho Falls, can be no festive pleasure excursion, even in 1925. Hardship, discomfort and misadventure are inescapable in trouping. Forty years ago they were vastly more so. Hotels were bad as a rule, train service infrequent and unreliable, theaters individually owned and operated and each stand a law unto itself; companies were usually wildcat enterprises compounded of hope and enthusiasm, the business unorganized and the player with no protection beyond the good faith of the manager. Thanks to Equity, the actor or actress left stranded or unpaid to-day has only himself to blame.
Then we accepted conditions as a matter of course, expected them when we set out, muddled through them with as much ingenuity as we could muster and forgot them with the week or the season.
In those four years on the road in the late seventies and early eighties, we encountered enough slings and arrows to keep an actor of this generation in anecdotes for an idle winter at the Lambs Club, but only one left a lasting memory with me.
Christmas fell upon a Saturday in the first
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