Ode

Back of the last row in a famed Parisian theatre, an old man leaned heavily on his cane. A bushy white beard he had, and silken hair on his head, tres distingue.

His eyes, grave, misty, searched out the stage, followed from right to left the song-swayed limbs of Raquel Meller.

In Spanish shawl, she sang an unaccomplished Spanish love. With eyes, mouth, chin, fingers, feet, she told the story of her song. Then a last tender note half-unsung, she stopped, plucked a flower from her dress, swung across the footlights made as if to throw it to some paunchy fellow, and did not. So everybody laughed after their tears, and Raquel flitted backstage under cover of thunderous applause.

If she was not to appear again that night, the distinguished old gentleman would depart, hoping the next night to avoid a boring banquet, to return to the theatre early, having a seat.

One night, Robert Underwood Johnson, Director of the Hall of Fame, ex-editor, famed poet, one-time U. S. Ambassador to Italy, was not at the theatre. In bed at his hotel, enveloped in a blue and white dressing-gown, he was writing an ode beneath the electric light. Thus a reporter found him, and elicited these words: "Raquel Meller is the world's greatest living artiste. . . It is hard to analyze just why she is so wonderful for her charm lies in the fact that she is so perfectly graceful in many ways.

"Often they put her between suggestive scenes, but when she appears with the freshness of youth all suggestiveness is forgotten for the time.

"She is all that is artistic without being vulgar and is the one ac- tress today who can wink without being suggestive. She has the grace that even Duse did not have."

His last night in Paris, Mr. Johnson met Senorita Meller, gave her his ode.

*Raquel Meller, a European enthusiasm, well press-agented, will come to the U.S. this winter.