Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/273

Rh grumbled, when he was back in Forty-fifth Street with a cheque in his pocket. "It used to be that we went to the hotel man and showed him that the only chance he had of collecting was to advance our fares to the next date and come with us and get his money out of the box-office receipts. If business was bad in the next town we repeated the process. I remember once when we had so many hotel men traveling with us that we organized them into a Landlords' Chorus that was a wow. It got so that we had to wire the advance man to pick out a hotel where the proprietor sang bass, we had so many tenors in the chorus. Those were the days!"

The Friars is a successful institution, younger than but similar in purpose and structure to The Lambs. George M. Cohan is the leading figure and the present Abbot, as its presiding officer is designated. They have a handsome club house in West Forty-eighth Street.

The oldest of all and the least known, even among the profession, is the Actors Order of Friendship, a secret order organized seventy-five years ago in Philadelphia when that city still was the capital of the American theater. Shakespeare Lodge Number 1 in Philadelphia