Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/231

Rh together and we began giving occasional entertainments, usually burlesques on current successes. There were but two that year. Otis Skinner, Joseph Holland, Kyrle Bellew and Thomas Whiffen, whose widow has become the "grand old lady" of our stage, were on the first program. Digby Bell and I were on the second.

But it was the third, held on May 1, 1889, which is remembered. Out of it grew a tragedy as strange as some of the macabre flights of Poe's imagination. That night Washington Irving Bishop, a professional mind reader, exposer of spiritualism and former associate of Anna Eva Fay, was a guest of Henry E. Dixey and volunteered on the program. Clay Greene offered himself as a subject. Bishop asked Greene to think of a name and the first that came to Greene was that of a guest whose signature he had noticed on the club register earlier in the evening.

Blindfolded, Bishop led Greene directly to the register, ran a finger down the page and stopped at the signature of the man of whom Greene had thought. Several moments later Bishop apparently fainted. Physicians in the audience examined him, pronounced it catalepsy and restored the mind reader. Some in the club