ODD STORIES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12524, 17 March 1904, Page 3

ODD STORIES.

' A SENATOR HANNA STORY. Senator Hakna, who has contradicted the report that he would run Mr. Roosevelt for the American Presidency, has a keen sense of humour. One of the stories put down to him tells how in Portugal (wfiere he was bora, by the way) a black man and a white man were once riding together along a lonely road. The road led past a gaol, and in the courtyard of the gaol there was a gallows. * "Jim," said the white man, "it that gallows had its due where would you be?" " Guess ah'd be riding alone, sah," Jim replied.' AWKWARD, VERY. A well-known actor relates how he was requested to take down to dinner a young lady who had' not rightly caught his name, and had no idea that he was the hero of a play about which all London was talking. Finding conversation difficult, he ventured to mention the play, and to ask the girl if she thought- it would enjoy a long run. ' "People are saving so," she answered, "but I hope, for the sake of poor Miss —— (naming the actress who took the heroines part in the play). " that it won't last long." "Why, pray?" asked the astonished actor. ' " Oil." said the other, with a pretty pout, " fancy having to be kissed on three or four hundred nights by that awful man who plays the hero! It's too dreadful!" The actor confesses that he was silent and thoughtful during the remainder of the meal. TWO STAGE STORIES. Actor.! and actresses do not always allow for the fact that "property" weather does not invariably agree with the thermometer. Mr. Beeriiohm Tree tells that once, when he was playing before a New York audience, the scene represented intense cold. Mr. Tree's lines called tor remarks upon the frigidity of the atmosphere, and as he delivered them he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped from his face the perspiration that had been induced by the heavy fur overcoat he was wearing. Miss Kathryn Kidder made an equally ridiculous error once. She had the part of a worker in • laundry, and was busily engaged in ironing, when a stray cat walked on tc the stage. Miss Kidder, to give a touch of domesticity to the scene, picked up the cat, petted uer, and put her down on the nearest place at. hand. Suddenly there was a ripple of laughter in the audience, and Miss Kidder instinctively looked for the cat. She saw her curled up sleeping where she had put her—among the irons on the supposedly red-hot range. IRVING AND THE COSTER. "My barnstorming days," said Henry Irving 'recently, " seem very distant, and yetvery dear to me now. I recall with particular pleasure a melodrama of crime in high life wherewith I barnstormed the province:; for two successful seasons. " My part called in the first act for a dark stage. In this darkness I fought with an old earl, threw him heavily, and when he did not rise after the loud thud of his fall I cried out: " Great heavens ! What have I done?" "Usually this scene impressed and moved my audience tremendously; but I remember one night in Birmingham when a coster, with one little witticism, turned my outcry and the darkness and the old earl's tragic fall into ridicule and laughter. _ " I have never seen that coster, but I remember bis voice well. It was a slow, dry voice, like Mark Twain's, and it manifested itself just after the fall of my aged and noble antagonist. The old earl had dropped heavily, and' in the silent obscurity I cried: 'Great, heavens! What have 1 done?' when the coster spoke up: "■: "'Strike a light, young fellow, and well have a look !' "