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Years ago when horse dramas reigned in the Broadway theaters, as well as in the less aristocratic locality of the Bowery, an enterprising manager determined to bring out Herne the Hunter, “in the highest style of the art.” A number of horses, circus men and innumerable supernumeraries were engaged, and the piece produced under the most horse-piece-cious circumstances. The eventful night arrived, the house was crammed. The play progressed, people came on and off the stage, talked, raced, shouted, went through traps, climbed canvas rocks, and indulged in all the customary motions of a grand “spectacle.” There has always been a natural feud between actors and circus folks. The ring people despise those who can only “cackle,” (flash term for talk), while the stage fellows say that folks who travel on their shape, and have no brains to back them up, are contemptible. In those days there was even less good feeling between the two professions than at present. The supes aspiring to the dignity of “the stage” were more intense in their antipathy to the riders than were the actors themselves, and being always ready for a lark, some of them procured a lot of a peculiar kind of tinder which is readily lighted and could be surreptitiously blown into a horse’s nostrils without the culprit being detected. Suddenly in the midst of the performance the horses became restive, and in a moment became unmanageable. Some reared and kicked, some broke through the stage, while others, trampling the foot lights under foot, plunged into the orchestra. All was confusion. An actor advances to the foot lights and assures the audience that they need feel no alarm—nothing of importance is amiss—it is “all right.” At this very moment two horses are murdering their riders in the orchestra. One of the men, literally impaled upon the spikes around the railing, presents a sickening, horrifying, spectacle as he writhes in his death agony. Of course the play was not concluded; the audience departed shocked at the awful sight they had witnessed, and the supes, who had intended no farther harm than a little amusement at the expense of the circus men, now bitterly repented their thoughtless folly. They did what they could to atone for trick by making up a purse for the benefit of the families of the principal victims of the unfortunate affair, but the horse drama had received its death blow on Broadway.

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