least twenty years, but few plays have had more performances on our stage; "Uncle Tom's Cabin", of course, and "East Lynne" and "Charley's Aunt", perhaps. It played continuously from 1881 to 1885.
The "Hazel Kirke" tour carried us into the Rocky Mountains to Leadville, two miles high on the flank of the Great Divide, then the lustiest boom camp that ever buried its dead with their boots on. Leadville drowses to-day in the high Rockies, dreaming of its fierce youth, but in 1883 it was only four years old, the most spectacular mining camp in the world and producing a fifth of the silver and a third of the country's lead.
Easy come, easy go was the town's shibboleth, and the coming and the going was a startling spectacle to a New York youth in his early twenties. The greatest of the camp's gambling houses was the Brick Exchange, operated by a man from Brooklyn still in his thirties. The lower floor was a public gambling house, the upper a private one under the guise of a club of three hundred and sixty members, the badge of membership being a key to the premises. Harry Davenport and I wandered pop-eyed into the lower floor and were given the privileges
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