The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-13
Comedr and sprained AnkIes

"The late Peter F. Daley was noun tain of flesh as well as a mountain of unction. He was forever spraining his ankles, yet he continued his grotesque dances and his peculiarly comfortable style of comedy.
 When his company opened In Chicago he felt that he ought to play at least the first performance, though he had already developed the pneumonia of which he died a few days later. He went on the stage with a temperature of 1o31s degrees and was so blinded with fever that he ran into scenery once, but he kept his comedy .bubbling till the last curtain.
 Mrs. Annie Yeamans told me of the last hours of that splendid old Irishman Denis OSullivan. The opera Peggy Machree' was making it's way in New York when he fell i'll of appendicitis. Doctors ordered him to quit playing and undergo an operation, but with all an actors horror of closing a run he re- fused. For five days he went without food and sang and acted a jovial Irish man while he was writhing with agony On his last night he played one whole act standing by chair from which he could not move When he made his final exit he whispered to a woman on the stage to hold his hand and lead him off lest
 
 Actors have a constant need for self control under difficulties The person impersonating the corpse may not sneeze, however his palate tickles. Mime. Melba singing the role of Juliet in New York some years ago, gave a typical instance of this. In the last act she lay on the bier lightly clad and pretending to be comatose. From an open door some where off stage an icy December draft focused itself upon her
 "She felt herself freezing, and foresaw the possibility of pneumonia and death. She actually caught a severe bronchitis that silenced her for three weeks at the cost of many thousands of dollars; and yet she lay motionless and never dreamed of saving perhaps her very life by the simple expedient of sitting up and shout ing: Shut that doorr
 Tt was only this last season when Miss Henrietta Crossman, playing Sham, received word of her fathers death just before the curtain went up. She kept her own grief out of the au- thors comedy until the third act, when she had to read this sentence aloud from letter, Now that your poor dear fa- ther Is dead and safely in his grave
 Then she broke down: but the audi ence took her tears as the merest real ism.
 Some years ago Marion Manola man. aged to play every performance without a breakdown, though she spent her spare hours at the bedside of her little daughter, who was undergoing an oper- alton that might result in blindness, and during this period she was compelled to make an all-night journey to attend the funeral of her only brother and get back for the matinee.
 "A few years ago, in an English play. Boys Together the hero was supposed to transfx the williams left hand to a table while he forced him to sign a con- fession. One night he really did it. The i villain MT. Cynds, spoke his lines, signed his name and fainted when the curtain fell An actor in Paris received bullet wound in the breast not long ago, and he played on to the end of the act.
 An earthquake shook the theatre in San Jose when Miss Florence Roberts was playing my play, ''The Transforms ton Memories of the San Francisco cataelysm started a stampede, but Miss Roberts quieted the audience by a few words. then went on with the role.
 Tt was Eddie Toy whose buffooneries were interrupted by the Iroquois theatre Ire ana panlc. let ne 5looo among the falling embers trying to control the stam- pede, and 1t was only after he had done all he could that he dragged his own child from a box and escaped.
 Somehow the vision of this man, with courage radiant in his chalked clown face, with his grotesque costame scorched and burned with embers as he stands on the blazing scene and calls good counsel through the smoke of tha; inferno, seems fit to symbolize the hero isms of the stage. Afterwards Eddie Toy was a nervous wreck for months, but l they have habit of waiting till the cur tain before they collapse, these actors"