"Pudd'nhead Wilson"

The scenes of Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson" are laid on the banks of the Mississippi in a Missouri village which he calls Dawsons Landing, and they occur away back in the mid-century years, when the black man was a slave, when New Orleans was the mecca toward which all things flowed in one direction, and St. Louis was the opposite pole of life on the lower Mississippi.

The action of the play cannot fail to impress one who is familiar with the great Mississippi valley and its people with the local atmosphere which abounds in the story; the characters are not overdrawn; their prototypes can be found today in any river village between St.Louis and New Orleans. Slavery no longer exists, but the negro is there, lazy, shiftless, poor in poverty, yet happy as a lord. The villagers known in the play as "the wise men of Dawson" still live, and are engaged in sitting for hours at a time under the spreading awnings in front of the drugstore, the shoe shop, the postoffice, or the saloon, discussing the questions of the day.

When the Missouri folks told Mark Twain's story in Boston last season it met with great favor. The play will return to the Tremont for its second visit tomorrow night. The cast, aside from Mr. Theo. Hamilton, who has succeeded Mr. Mayo as Pudd'nhead Wilson, Miss Ada Dwyer as Roxy and Edwin F. Mayo as the sheriff, will be the same as seen last season in the play.