My first printed attacks on this class of performers were made in the Galaxy magazine, in the summer of 1867. At that time the chief exponents of the "leg business" were women who made a specialty of such rôles as Mazeppa, in which they represented, at one point in the play, a naked man strapped on the back of a horse.

These women's power lay confessedly in their exhibition of their persons, (the ostensible object being to represent an unclad man), and no woman who could have enchained an audience otherwise would ever have descended to this baseness. But such women were never actresses in the true sense, and among the reputable members of the profession were, as a rule, tabooed and avoided in private-even by those who were compelled to appear on the same stage with them in public.

But these leg-performers were so few in number, and so confessedly low, that the evil did not assume such frightful proportions as it subsequently did, when it took the shape of burlesque.

There were burlesque actresses in those days, too, but they were never very successful-for the simple reason that they did not so outrage decency as to draw the staring crowd. Such were the Worrell sisters, the Webb sisters, the Leffingwell troupe, and others of their class. Their chief attraction was the fun they made, and the actresses who presented this class of entertainment were not infrequently young women of irreproachable private character.

The spectacular play of the "Black Crook" was the desperate resort of a manager who had been losing money in alarming amounts for several months, and at the end of a disastrous season was forced to close his theatre.

The resolve was made to create a sensation which should startle the town, and revive the drooping fortunes of the theatre.

Great preparations were made; the newspapers were

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"worked" for weeks in advance with the most indefatigable persistence; wonderful rumors were set afloat; public curiosity was excited to the utmost; and at last the doors of the theatre were flung open and a dense crowd rushed for seats.

The play was a mass of dreary twaddle, magnificently mounted, superbly costumed, and presenting a troupe of French and Italian dancers in costumes which at that time were startlingly scant.

The piece created a furore. The leading dancers became the town talk; their portraits, hung about town in public places, were surrounded by crowds of gaping men; they were exalted to the pinnacle of public favor, and men raved about Bonfanti, Sangali, Betty Rigl, etc., as if they had been demi-goddesses instead of being merely ballet girls.

But there came a time when this highly spiced sensation palled on the masculine appetite. The French and Italian demi-goddesses were dethroned; and were destined to behold their subjects rally in great force around the flag of "perfidious Albion," on the arrival from England of a troupe of blonde-haired burlesque women, to whom the fickle public transferred its devotion, and over whom it went wild.

The "Black Crook" was withdrawn, and a piece of the same character, entitled the "White Fawn," appealed in vain for favor.

The burlesquers came, and "Ixion" was the rage. This was a burlesque which contained a great number of British novelties, whose chief piquancy was derived from the fact that the women who performed in it talked slang and sang coarse songs with a very good imitation of that English accent which had hitherto been associated in our minds with ideas of culture and refinement. There was

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THE DRIZZLE AND THE DELUGE.

something very rib-tickling, as it seemed, in hearing a blonde-haired woman sing,

or

แ "Wokking in the Pawk !”

"I took up the baeuf baeuone
And shied eet at hees head."

At first, these burlesquers were modest, in some degree, and maintained that indescribable air of respectful deportment toward their audiences which they had been forced to preserve in Europe.

But as time passed on, and the young noodles of New York fast life began to shower them with bouquets, and take them to drive in Central Park, and give them late suppers at fashionable hotels, and generally lionize them in a way that made them open their eyes in amazement at American folly, they began to think there was nothing too bold and impudent for them to dare. They grew brazen and saucy, leered at men in the boxes, and generally exhibited a disrespectful regard for the audience, or what it might think of them.

The echo of their success reached English shores and set all British burlesquedom agog with the eager desire to share in the glories and profits of the wild fever raging in this "blarsted country."

Then came the Deluge. An army of burlesque women took ship for America, and presently the New York stage presented one disgraceful spectacle of padded legs jigging and wriggling in the insensate follies and indecencies of the hour.

Rivalry grew so sharp that it seemed to be a scrub race with these women as to who should sing the vilest songs, dress with the greatest immodesty, dance the most indecent dances, and indulge in the supremest vulgarity and license of gesture.