Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/148

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taining advertisements of the leading merchants of Maple Valley. The Silverdale Drug Store contributed a drawing of a slightly magnified (in relation to the scale of the objects shown in the Italian tableau) hot-water bottle, with the assurance that this store carried a full line of rubber goods and drugs. The Isham Candy Company required an oblong in which to hint that Isham candies were just the thing for your mother and sweetheart. Newly killed beef only is on sale at the Main Street Market, read another inscription, while the Maple Valley Jewelry Company advertised a fine stock of clocks, watches, brooches, wedding rings, and precious gems of every description.

In this period in American history, few travelling companies visiting one-night stands carried their own scenery, depending, rather, on the theatres to supply their needs. Most of the smaller playhouses made meagre providence in this regard, considering one exterior, a wood or a garden, and two interiors, a palace and a hovel, quite ample to fit the exigencies of any known drama. The stock sets at Hall's Opera House were more numerous. There were two exteriors, both a wood and a garden, and three interiors, besides two sets of sliding flats which joined with dirty seams down the centre directly behind the act-drop: one of which represented a street in a city, with a drinking fountain, over which doves statically hovered, a church with a sky-scraping spire, and two rows of brown-stone houses,