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  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  THEATER-GOING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

  "I am sorry to interrupt," said Edith, "but it wants only five minutes ofthe time for the rising of the curtain, and Julian ought not to miss thefirst scene."

  On this notice we at once betook ourselves to the music room, where foureasy chairs had been cozily arranged for our convenience. While thedoctor was adjusting the telephone and electroscope connections for ouruse, I expatiated to my companion upon the contrasts between theconditions of theater-going in the nineteenth and in the twentiethcenturies--contrasts which the happy denizens of the present world canscarcely, by any effort of imagination, appreciate. "In my time, only theresidents of the larger cities, or visitors to them, were ever able toenjoy good plays or operas, pleasures which were by necessary consequenceforbidden and unknown to the mass of the people. But even those who as tolocality might enjoy these recreations were obliged, in order to do so,to undergo and endure such prodigious fuss, crowding, expense, andgeneral derangement of comfort that for the most part they preferred tostay at home. As for enjoying the great artists of other countries, onehad to travel to do so or wait for the artists to travel. To-day, I neednot tell you how it is: you stay at home and send your eyes and earsabroad to see and hear for you. Wherever the electric connection iscarried--and there need be no human habitation however remote from socialcenters, be it the mid-air balloon or mid-ocean float of the weatherwatchman, or the ice-crusted hut of the polar observer, where it may notreach--it is possible in slippers and dressing gown for the dweller totake his choice of the public entertainments given that day in every cityof the earth. And remember, too, although you can not understand it, whohave never seen bad acting or heard bad singing, how this ability of onetroupe to play or sing to the whole earth at once has operated to takeaway the occupation of mediocre artists, seeing that everybody, beingable to see and hear the best, will hear them and see them only."

  "There goes the bell for the curtain," said the doctor, and in anothermoment I had forgotten all else in the scene upon the stage. I need notsketch the action of a play so familiar as "The Knights of the GoldenRule." It is enough for this purpose to recall the fact that the costumesand setting were of the last days of the nineteenth century, littledifferent from what they had been when I looked last on the world of thatday. There were a few anachronisms and inaccuracies in the setting whichthe theatrical administration has since done me the honor to solicit myassistance in correcting, but the best tribute to the general correctnessof the scheme was its effect to make me from the first moment obliviousof my actual surroundings. I found myself in presence of a group ofliving contemporaries of my former life, men and women dressed as I hadseen them dressed, talking and acting, as till within a few weeks I hadalways seen people talk and act; persons, in short, of like passions,prejudices, and manners to my own, even to minute mannerisms ingeniouslyintroduced by the playwright, which even more than the larger traits ofresemblance affected my imagination. The only feeling that hindered myfull acceptance of the idea that I was attending a nineteenth-centuryshow was a puzzled wonder why I should seem to know so much more than theactors appeared to about the outcome of the social revolution they werealluding to as in progress.

  When the curtain fell on the first scene, and I looked about and sawEdith, her mother and father, sitting about me in the music room, therealization of my actual situation came with a shock that earlier in mytwentieth-century career would have set my brain swimming. But I was toofirm on my new feet now for anything of that sort, and for the rest ofthe play the constant sense of the tremendous experience which had mademe at once a contemporary of two ages so widely apart, contributed anindescribable intensity to my enjoyment of the play.

  After the curtain fell, we sat talking of the drama, and everything else,till the globe of the color clock, turning from bottle-green to white,warned us of midnight, when the ladies left the doctor and myself to ourown devices.