has to be driven with a whip and a revolver fired off in its face; they never look anything but bored and morose and anxious to eat the tamer.—I saw also a red-eyed hippopotamus in a cage only twice its length and in which I suppose he had been hauled from Bridgeport to New York and was to be hauled from New York to Cincinnati. He gazed wildly from his meagre bath with the frightened innocence of cows in cattle-trains, and when one of the hands slammed a trunk behind him he started like a nervous woman. I pity this hippopotamus and wish he were back in his native swamp.
Amateurs of the slapstick arts who go in for Joe Cook and Charlie Chaplin, should not fail to see the vaudeville act known as Williams and Wolfus. Herbert Williams is a clown of a high order with a curious fantasy of his own. Obviously a serious and respectable character, he seems doomed to failure and disappointment. When he first comes on there is no spotlight and he has to shout to the electrician; he desires to sing a song, but his voice is not quite strong enough, and when he does get under way his silk hat begins slipping off. Then the orchestra leader turns out to be a malignant demon who, instead of keeping time with the baton, begins twirling it like a drum-major and otherwise behaving like a fiend. Williams finally snatches the stick away from him and bashes him with it over the head, but the baton only bends in two and the demon remains unscathed. There is nothing for the poor gentleman to do but to hand it back politely. As he touchingly confides to the audience in his low inadequate voice: "This is very embarrassing for me!" His adventures have the quality of a bad dream—or of a French Dadaist drama. I suppose it will only be a question of time before someone puts him in a review.
