"What's the reason you won't be here?" asked Max.
"I play for a dance over to Masonic Hall."
"We all do, but the drummer," said the flute player.
"_You do?_ Then what the devil have you kept me here rehearsing you for three hours for?" demanded Max.
"Well," said the cornet player, "we knew this was a big show, and we presumed you would be a good director, and we thought the practice would do us good."
On another occasion he struggled all the afternoon with a "Glee Club and Mandolin Serenaders'" orchestra. Finally, by cutting out all solos, playing all the accompaniments himself, and confining the "Glee Club" to "um-pahs," he got everything figured out except the cornet player; he was beyond pardon; so Max said to him,
"I am awful sorry, old man, but you won't do; so you just sit and watch the show to-night."
"Oh," said the Not-Jule-Levy, "then I don't play, eh?"
"All right then; then there'll be no show."
"Because I am the Mayor, and I will revoke your license."
At some Southern town we played once with "The Old Homestead"; the rehearsal was called for 4:30. At 4:30 all the musicians were there but the bass fiddler.
"Where is your bass fiddler?" asked our director.
"Well, he can't get here just yet," replied one of the other players.
"Well, if it rains he is liable to be in any minute now; if it don't rain he can't get here until six o'clock."
The worst orchestra I ever heard was with an Uncle Tom's Cabin show playing East St. Louis. It consisted of two pieces; a clarinet and a bass fiddle, each worse than the other.
At North Goram, Maine, I once hired an entire brass band of twenty-two pieces to play for an entire evening of roller skating in the town hall, for three dollars. They were worth every dollar of it.
In one of my plays I issue a newspaper called _The Wyoming Whoop_. At the top of the first column are the words--"In Hoc Signo Vinces." One day one of the stage hands came to me with a copy of the paper in his hands, and pointing to this line, said,
"That means 'We Shoot to Kill,' don't it?"
My wife was in a hair-dressing parlor in Cleveland; the girl who was doing what ever she was doing to her, discovered that she was the Miss Dayne at Keith's Theater.
"Oh, say," she said, "I wish you would tell me something."