[ 160 ] VERA BRODSKY LAWRENCE with entirely leaving out the singing, which is a very great damage to the piece. The manager wishes to continue it before the Public, but, until Mrs. Waring recovers, (which is quite uncertain, her confinement proceeding from a complaint that lays her by almost every winter,) I shall not permit it, having in my possession both words and Music.37 Between you and I, no one about the Theatre is able to play the character but Mrs. W—and I do not wish to be garbled, for, in my oppinion, with all that good acting can do for me, I expect very shortly to be honored with severe criticism. Yet "who's afraid?"38 In addition to the four performances mentioned in Hawkins' letter (on November 29 and 30 and December 1 and 4),39 a single performance of The Saw-Mill was announced in the Commercial Advertiser on December 31,1824, and another (with Mrs. Fisher, who probably by then had learned the songs, as Louisa) in the same newspaper on March 5,1825. No other performances of the work have been noted.40 A clue to the fate of the unpublished Saw Mill score is suggested by William Sidney Mount, who wrote to C. M. Cady on November 24, 1853: "After [Hawkins'] death his good wife, a member of the Presbyterian Church, felt that she would be serving the Lord, by giving her servant his plays and writings in manuscript to heat the tea kettle with, and I firmly believe that many a hearty laugh was destroyed in consequence!'41 Two non-musical New York fables in verse, anonymously "printed 37The manager of the Chatham Garden Theatre in 1824 was its founder, Henry Bar- riere (or Barrere), not Henry Wallack, as cited in Wegelin, "Micah Hawkins and The Saw-Mill^' 157. 88 Hawkins to Thompson, December 7, 1824, Library of Congress; also quoted in Wegelin, "Micah Hawkins and The Saw-Mill" 156. 39 Advertised in the New-York American, the Evening Post, the Commercial Advertiser, and, no doubt, other newspapers as well. 40 Overenthusiastic Hawkinsites were less than precise in their later reports of the "long and highly successful career" enjoyed by The Saw-Mill. The anonymous admirer quoted by Wegelin ("Micah Hawkins and The Saw-Mill" 157) presents a touching fiction of an uncharacteristically embarrassed Hawkins, standing on the stage, "fiddle in hand, covered with blushes and a pepper and salt suit" too shy to respond to the tumultous ovation accorded him by an apocryphal twentieth-night audience. "Here he was in a bad dilemma, being unable to speak his thanks, but Wallack [again Wallack] came to his aid, and got him off triumphantly!' Wegelin is mistaken as well in stating that The Saw-Mill continued to be "played at the Park Theatre as late as November 29, 1825!' Not so. 41 Quoted in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 91. "Every remark in his most ordinary conversation was full of graphic humor" wrote the author of "Sable Minstrels and American Opera"