Note 5 — III. FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

Speculation in theatre tickets seems now to have reached its height. Folks thought it had come to a lively pass when Sarah Bernhardt was here and some $23,000 worth of seats were disposed of for her engagement on the opening day of the sale. But, bless you, that was a mere drop in the bucket. A man named McBride, who has from keeping a small news-stand gradually come forward until he is now one of the richest of the ticket speculators, “got left,” as he picturesquely observed, on the Bernhardt affair. In other words, rival speculators got all the best seats. So McBride put twelve men on duty in front of the Star Theatre box-office three days before the Irving sales were to open, and there they stayed on duty day and night, until the window was finally thrown open. Each one of these men got ten season-tickets for the Irving engagement, which is to last four weeks. In other words, every one of these men bought two hundred and eighty tickets of admission to the Star Theatre, so that McBride now holds for the Irving season a neat little pile of three thousand three hundred and sixty tickets. They were bought at season-ticket prices of $60 per set of twenty-eight, and, therefore, cost the speculator the sum of $7,200. Now you will see how the speculator happens to have the bulge on the Irving management. The box-office price of a ticket for a single performance is $3, and even if the demand should not happen to be as immense as to warrant a long advance on the box-office tariff, McBride can sell his tickets at the regular price of $3 apiece and get the sum of $10,080 for them, which will leave him a profit of nearly $3,000 upon his short investment. There is, however, little or no likelihood that he will be obliged to resort to this manner of doing business. For the first night he has already sold seats for $10 and $15 each, and it is quite reasonable to suppose that as the time approaches, and tickets become scarce, he can advance to a still higher price. These ticket-speculators have regular customers, who willingly pay them the ordinary price they ask rather than bother about going to the box-office. When Anna Dickinson wants to visit a theatre in New York she invariably buys her tickets of Tyson, who charges her $2 for a $1.50 seat. So it is with a good many other people, particularly the rich and reckless down-town brokers, who purchase their tickets during the day, and who, rather than take the trouble to send a messenger away up to the theatre they intend to visit, go to the speculator’s branch office and pay the advance demanded for whatever they want. There are only a few regular ticket-speculators in New York. Old Fred Rullman, a Dutchman, was for a long time the chief operator in theatre tickets, but he seldom appears nowadays in any of the big deals. He works mostly in opera tickets, and is contented not to take heavy risks. McBride is the longest chance-taker of the lot. Tyson is not a risky buyer, but confines his purchases pretty closely to the demands of his regular customers.—New York Correspondent of St. Louis Spectator.