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"sees a land Where Nature seems to frame with practised hand Her last most wondrous work. Before him rise Mountains of solid rock that rift the skies, Imperial valleys with rich verdure crowned For leagues illimitable smile around, While through them subject seas for rivers run From ice-bound tracks to where the tropic sun Breeds in the teeming ooze strange monstrous things. He sees, upswelling from exhaustless springs, Great lakes appear, upon whose surface wide The banded navies of the earth may ride. He sees tremendous cataracts emerge From cloud-aspiring heights, whose slippery verge Tremendous oceans momently roll o'er, Assaulting with unmitigated roar The stunned and shattered ear of trembling day, That, wounded, weeps in glistening tears of spray."

Bottom was his most finished and artistic assumption, Hamlet probably his most amusing, and Humpty Dumpty his most successful. He played the latter part some fifteen hundred times in New York and elsewhere. It was the last part he ever attempted to play, and only as a clown does he exist in the minds of the men of to-day who think of him at all. He first appeared in New York at the National Theatre, in 1850; he was last seen at Booth's Theatre on the 25th of November, 1875--the saddest clown who ever chalked his face. After twenty years of constant, faithful service as public jester--shattered in health, broken in spirit, shaken in mind--he disappeared forever from public view. Alas, poor Yorick!

That burlesque "came natural" to Mr. Jefferson is shown in the wonderful successes of his half-brother, Charles Burke, in burlesque parts. Mr. Burke's admirers, even at the end of thirty-five years, still speak enthusiastically of his comic Iago, of his Clod Meddlenot , of his Mr. MacGreedy , of his Kazrac , and of his Met-a-roarer, in which he gave absurd imitations of Mr. Forrest as the Last of the Wampanoags.

No history of American burlesque could be complete without some mention of the name of Daniel Setchell. His Leah the Forsook, and Mark Smith's Madeline are remembered as pleasantly in New York as his Macbeth and Edwin Adams's Macduff are remembered in Boston. William H. Crane places the Macduff of Adams--he dressed in the volunteer uniform of the first year of the war, and read lines ridiculous beyond measure with all of the magnificent effect his wonderful voice and perfect elocution could give them--as the finest piece of burlesque acting it has ever been his good-fortune to see. But the stories told by the old comedians of the extravagant comedy performances of their contemporaries in other days, if they could be collected here, would extend this chapter far beyond the limits of becoming space.

If American burlesque did not die with John Brougham, it has hardly yet recovered from the shock of his death; and he certainly deserves a colossal statue in its Pantheon.

INFANT PHENOMENA OF AMERICA.

INFANT PHENOMENA OF AMERICA.

Scarcely larger than the violin he carried, dressed in a bright court suit of blue satin, with powdered wig and silken hose and buckled shoes, like a prince in a fairy tale, he seemed the slightest mite of a performer who ever stood behind the foot-lights. His hands were scarcely big enough to grasp his instrument; his arms and his legs were not so thick as his bow; a bit of rosin thrown at him would have knocked him down; and he could have been packed away comfortably in the case of his own fiddle. As a musician he certainly was phenomenal. It was said of him that when only four years of age, and after a single hearing, he could play by ear the most difficult and complicated of musical compositions, and that he could remember an air as soon as he could utter an articulate sound. Before he was five years old he was sole performer at concerts given under his father's management in some of the provincial towns of England; and when he first appeared in this country he not only played solos upon his violin, displaying decided genius and technical skill, but he conducted the large orchestra standing on a pile of music-books in the chair of the leader, that he might be seen of the musicians he led.

The grace and ease of the little artist, his enthusiasm and vivacity, could not fail to interest and amuse his audiences, while at the same time it saddened the most thoughtful of them, who realized how unnatural and how cruel to the child the whole proceeding must of necessity be. That he was passionately fond of his art there could be no doubt, or that he lived only in and for it, and in the excitement and applause his public appearances brought him; but that his indulgence of his passion without proper restraint was the cause of the snapping of the strings of his little life, and of the wreck of what might have been a brilliant professional career, was plainly manifest to every physician, and to every mother who saw and heard and pitied him.

The few musical prodigies who have succeeded Master Speaight in this country have been blessed, happily, with stronger constitutions or with wiser guardians; and Munrico Dengremont, Josef Hofman, and Otto Hegner, so far at least, have found the rest they need before it is too late. The little Dengremont, a violinist, began his professional life at the age of eight, and in 1875. He came of musical people, he had studied hard, and as a phenomenon he was very successful. He first appeared in New York in 1881, when he was fourteen years of age, but he seems to have produced nothing, and to have done nothing since he went back to Europe some years ago.

Hofman was born in Cracow, in 1877. His mother was an opera-singer, his father a teacher of music. The child had a piano of his own before he was five years of age, and in six months he had acquired the principles of musical composition, and had written an original mazourka. He made his first public appearance at a charity concert when he was six; at eight he played at a public concert at Berlin; and at ten he was drawing enormous crowds to the largest theatre in New York. He was the subject of more attention and of more newspaper notice, perhaps, than any musical child who ever lived. Saint-Sa?ns, the French composer, is said to have declared that he had nothing more to learn in music, that everything in him was music; and Rubinstein is said to have pronounced him the greatest wonder of the present age. All of this would have turned a bigger head than his; but notwithstanding his remarkable genius he was always a boy, who found relief in toy steamers and in tin soldiers; and his parents were sensible enough and humane enough to shut up his piano, and to sacrifice their ambition for the good of their son. He is devoting his youth to natural study, and his public career is still before him.

The little Hegner, the latest prodigy, made his first appearance in America in 1889, when he was twelve years of age; and he, too, came of a musical family. Like the Hofman infant, the piano is his instrument, and those who know music speak enthusiastically of his "phrasing," of his "interpretations," of his "striking perceptions of musical form," and the like. All of these children have been compared with Mozart and Liszt, who are, no doubt, innocently responsible for most of the infant musical wonders who have been born since they themselves began, as babies, to perform marvels. There has been but one Mozart, and but one Liszt; and the yet unwritten history of their lives will show whether these lads of the present would not have grown up to be greater artists and happier men if they had in their youth played foot-ball instead of fiddles, and had paid more attention to muscle than to music.

Between the musical wonder and the theatrical wonder there is this distinction: the baby musician never plays baby tunes, the infant actor almost always plays child's parts. Little Cordelia Howard, as Eva, many years ago, and Elsie Leslie and Thomas Russell, alternating in the character of Little Lord Fauntleroy last season, were doing very remarkable things in a charmingly natural way; but if they had attempted to play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth they would only have done what the musical prodigies are doing when they attempt Mendelssohn's D Minor Concerto or a mazourka by Chopin. The little actors are certainly the more rational, the more tolerable, and the more patiently to be endured.

Of the class of prodigies represented by Mr. and Mrs. Stratton , "Major" Stevens, "Commodore" Nutt, "Blind Tom," "Japanese Tommy," and the "Two-headed Nightingale," all of whom were publicly exhibited in their childhood here, it is hardly necessary to speak. They were certainly Infant Phenomena, but neither as infants nor as phenomena do they come within the proper scope of the present chapter; and they occupy the same position in regard to the drama that the armless youth who cuts paper pictures with his toes occupies in regard to pictorial art.

He does not educate the masses; he does not advance art; he does nothing which it is the high aim of the legitimate actor to do; he does not even amuse. He merely displays precocity that is likely to sap his very life; he probably supports a family at an age when he needs all of the protection and support that can be given him; and, if he does not meet a premature death, he rarely, very rarely, fulfils anything like the promise of his youth.

The excitement he created was marvellous. People were crushed in their efforts to enter the theatres in which he played. The receipts at the box-offices were considered fabulous in those days. His own fortune was made in a single season. Lords and ladies, and peers of the realm, were among his enthusiastic admirers. Royal dukes were proud to call him friend, and the Prince of Wales entertained him regally at Carlton House. He was pronounced greater than Garrick himself in Garrick's own parts; he was petted and praised, and almost idolized, by an entire country; and even Parliament itself, on a motion made by Mr. Pitt, adjourned to see the "Infant Roscius" play Hamlet at Drury Lane; than which no higher compliment could have been paid by England to mortal man!

This mania over the boy actor continued for two or three seasons, when his popularity by degrees decreased, and he retired from the stage to enter the University of Cambridge. In 1812, however, he returned to the profession a young man of twenty-one, but his prestige was gone. He did not draw in London; in the provinces he was regarded as nothing but a fair stock actor; and when he was a little more than thirty years of age he retired entirely into private life. He died in London, August 24, 1874, a man of eighty-three, having outlived his glory by at least fifty years. If such was the lot of the most marvellous of prodigies, what better fate can the managers of the lesser juvenile stars expect for their child wonders?

Mrs. Maeder comes of a theatrical race, and one which seems to mature early. Her sister, Jane Marchant Fisher, the good old Mrs. Vernon of Wallack's, went upon the stage in London a child of ten; Frederick G. Maeder, her son, made his first appearance at the age of eighteen; and Alexina Fisher and Oceana Fisher, daughters of Palmer Fisher, and members of the same family, played here as children half a century ago.

In 1856, no longer juveniles, though still most acute, voluble, and full of grace, they retired from the stage. Miss Kate Bateman returned to it, however, in a few years, a young lady, and an actress of more than ordinary merit. Even if she had not since then made for herself, both in this country and in England, a reputation as one of the strongest tragic and melodramatic artists on the English-speaking stage, the story of her early career as told here is worthy of a place in dramatic history because of the precocious excellence of her acting as a child, and of the wonderful success which she everywhere won. She was a Phenomenon among Phenomena in this respect, that she grew and advanced in her profession as she grew in stature and advanced in years--one of the very few of the infant prodigies who, in later life, became an ornament to the stage.

The Marsh Children, although generally announced by that name on the bills, were not members of one family, nor were they Marshes. George and Mary, brother and sister, and both of them said to have been less than eight years of age when they came here first, were in private life Master and Miss Guerineau--while the other leading lady, Louisa Marsh, was properly Miss McLaughlin. The entire company was composed of children. As they died--and the mortality among them was remarkable--or as they grew too large for the troupe, their places were filled by other precocious infants, engaged by their clever manager in his strollings from town to town. Among the members of the company at different times were Miss Ada Webb, Miss Fanny Berkley, Miss Ada and Miss Minnie Monk, and Louis Aldrich, all of whom, if not great, subsequently, in their profession, are still not unknown to fame. Unlike the Batemans, however, none of the Marsh Juveniles ever became stars of more than common magnitude, and none of them are shining very brilliantly on the stage to-day. George Marsh, the low comedian, was very clever in his way, although not original in his impersonations. His powers of imitation were marvellous, and his Toodles, a miniature copy of Burton's Toodles, in which all of the business and many of the gags--even to the profanity at the mention of Thompson--were retained, was almost as funny in its uproariousness as was Burton's Toodles itself, and certainly better than many of the imitations that have been seen since Burton's day. Little Mary Marsh was an uncommonly attractive child, bright-eyed, graceful, fresh, and fair. The boy between eight and fifteen in her audiences who did not succumb to her loveliness was only fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils. Her name was to be found written in some copy-book, her face sketched in some drawing-book in the male department of every school in New York, and in the average schoolboy's mind she was associated in some romantic way with all of the good and beautiful women of his history or his mythology; she inhabited all the salubrious and balmy isles in his geography; she was dreamed of in his philosophy; and one particular lad, who is now more than old enough to pay the school bills of boys of his own, when asked, in a chemistry class, by the master, "What is the symbol and equivalent of potassium?" answered, absently, but without hesitation, "Mary Marsh!"

The passion the child inspired in the breasts of her adorers was a pure one, and, except in the neglect of a prosy lesson or two, it did no harm. Her memory is still kept green in the hearts of many practical men of to-day, who unblushingly confess to a filling of their boyish eyes and a quivering of their boyish lips when the sad story of her untimely and dreadful death was told here. While playing in one of the Southern cities, her dress took fire from the footlights and she was fatally burned, living but an hour or two after the accident occurred.

BLACK-EYED SUSAN.

William Miss Louisa Marsh. Gnatbrain Master George H. Marsh. Tom Bowling Master Alfred . Admiral Master Waldo . Dolly Mayflower Miss Carrie . Black-eyed Susan Miss Mary Marsh.

TOODLES.

Timothy Toodles Master George H. Marsh. George Acorn Miss Louisa Marsh. Tabitha Toodles Miss Mary Marsh.

Of the juvenile actors of the present time something has already been said. As a rule they belong to the legitimate branches of the profession, and they are as rational, perhaps, as is the drummer-boy of the army, the elevator-boy of society, or the cash-boy of trade. Alice in Wonderland adorns a charming tale, Prince and Pauper and Little Lord Fauntleroy point a pretty moral, even Editha's Burglar may have his uses; but, take them as a whole, it is a difficult matter to determine the exact position of the Infant Phenomena upon the stage. They occupy, perhaps, the neutral ground between the amateurs and the monstrosities, without belonging to either class, or to art. As professional performers, although in embryo, they cannot share exemption from the severe tests of criticism with those who only play at being players; and as human beings, although undeveloped, they cannot be judged as leniently as are the learn?d pigs and the trained monkeys from whom some of Mr. Darwin's disciples might believe them to be evolved. The public demands them, however, and dramatists make them; therefore let them pass for stars!

A CENTURY OF AMERICAN HAMLETS.

A CENTURY OF AMERICAN HAMLETS.

The first Hamlet in New York in point of quality, and perhaps the second in point of time, was that of Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, who played the part at the John Street Theatre on the 22d of November, 1797, although Mr. Ireland believes that he was preceded by Mr. Moreton at the theatre on Greenwich Street, in the summer of the same year, as he had played the Ghost to Moreton's Hamlet in Baltimore a short time before. William Dunlap speaks in the highest terms of Cooper's Hamlet, and John Bernard ranks it with the Hamlet of John Philip Kemble himself.

John Howard Payne enjoys the distinction of being the first American Hamlet who was born in America, and he had been born but seventeen years when he played Hamlet at the Park Theatre in May, 1809. Two years later, on the 5th of April, 1811, he introduced the tragedy to Albany audiences, and his Hamlet, naturally, was as immature and as amateur as it was premature.

But to leave the pygmies and return to the giants. Play-goers in New York between the years 1810 and 1821 were blessed, as play-goers have never been blessed before, in being able to enjoy and to compare the performances of three of the greatest actors it has ever been the lot of any single pair of eyes to see or of any single pair of ears to hear: to wit, Cooke, Kean, and Booth. George Frederick Cooke arrived in America in 1810, and remained here until his death in 1812. Setting at defiance all the laws of nature, society, and art, he was in nothing more remarkable than in the fact that in the whole history of the drama in this country he is the only really great tragedian, old or young, who never attempted to play Hamlet here. His diary records his failure in the part in London years before; and Leigh Hunt, who praises him highly in other lines, says that he could willingly spare the recollection of his Hamlet, and that "the most accomplished character on the stage he converted into an unpolished, obstinate, sarcastic madman."

That Edwin Booth should not have written concerning the Hamlet of his father in the same charming vein is greatly to be regretted. There are men still living who recollect the elder Booth in the part--he played it for the last time in New York in 1843--and to these it is one of the most delightful of memories. Thomas R. Gould, writing in 1868, sums up as follows his own ideas of the Hamlet of this great man: "The total impression left by his impersonation at the time of its occurrence, and which still abides, was that of a spiritual melancholy, at once acute and profound. This quality colored his tenderest feeling and his airiest fancy. You felt its presence even when he was off the stage."

This famous decade of the New York stage saw other great actors and other great Hamlets, some of whom in point of time preceded Kean and Booth. Joseph George Holman played Hamlet at the Park Theatre in September, 1812, James William Wallack, on the same stage, in September, 1818, Robert Campbell Maywood in 1819, John Jay Adams in 1822, William Augustus Conway in 1824, Thomas Hamblin in 1825, and last, but not least, William Charles Macready in October, 1826.

Concerning the Hamlet of Charles Kemble, his daughter wrote, in 1832: "I have acted Ophelia three times with my father, and each time in that beautiful scene where his madness and his love gush forth together, like a torrent swollen with storms that bears a thousand blossoms on its turbid waters, I have experienced such deep emotion as hardly to be able to speak.... Now the great beauty of all my father's performances, but particularly of Hamlet, is a wonderful accuracy in the detail of the character which he represents," etc.

Macready described Charles Kemble as a first-rate actor in second-rate parts, and said that "in Hamlet he was Charles Kemble at his heaviest," while other critics dismiss his Hamlet as "passable." Thus do the doctors of criticism disagree.

Forrest first played Hamlet in New York at the Park Theatre, in the month of October, 1829, when he was but twenty-three years of age; and at his last public appearance here, November 22, 1872, he read portions of the tragedy at Steinway Hall. Mr. Eddy, Mr. Studley, and other tragedians of Mr. Forrest's "school of acting" were not more satisfactory in the part of Hamlet than was Mr. Forrest himself. John McCullough, however, a pupil of Forrest's, and his leading man for a number of years, met with more success. Although a native of Ireland, his professional life was begun and almost entirely spent in America, and he may be considered a native Hamlet, to this manor born. His voice and action in certain scenes where loud declamation is demanded by the text were quite after the manner of Forrest, but as a whole he excelled his master in the part. He was free from mannerisms, his figure was manly and striking, he was neither too puny nor too burly, his sentiment was not mawkish, nor was his honesty brutal.

The faithful band of Mr. Davenport's friends who followed him to the west side of the town, during his occasional visits to the metropolis, found nothing in his acting to wean them from their allegiance, while he made many new and enthusiastic friends among the gods of the gallery, those keen and appreciative critics whose verdict, although not always the general verdict, is ever, in an artistic way, the most valuable and pleasing to the actor. But galleries, alas! do not fill managers' pockets, nor do they lead the popular taste; and Mr. Davenport, at one time a universal favorite in New York with galleries, boxes, and pits, lived to find himself, through no fault of his own, and to the lasting discredit of metropolitan audiences, neglected and ignored.

The several engagements of Mr. and Mrs. Davenport after this were in no way remarkable, except sadly remarkable that so great an actor should have been forced, in the greatest city of the Union, to play Hamlet to such poor houses and with such uncongenial surroundings.

The Hamlet of Edwin Booth, without doubt, is the most familiar and the most popular in America to-day. He has played the part in every important town in the Union, many hundreds of nights in New York alone, and to hundreds of thousands of persons, the warmest of his admirers and most constant attendants at his performances being men and women who are emphatically non-theatre-goers, and who never enter a play-house except to see Mr. Booth, and Mr. Booth in a Shaksperian part. He has done very much more than any other actor to educate the popular taste to a proper understanding of Hamlet, and to a proper appreciation of the beauties of the tragedy. He is the ideal Hamlet of half the people of the country who have any idea of Hamlet whatever.

Mr. Booth's Hamlet is original in many respects; it is intellectual, intelligent, carefully studied, complete to the smallest details, and greatly to be admired. Nature has given him the melancholy, romantic face, the magnetic eye, the graceful person, the stately carriage, the poetic temperament, which are in so marked a degree characteristic of Hamlet, while his genius in many scenes of the tragedy carries him far above any of the Hamlets this country has seen in many generations of plays.

The Hamlet of Salvini is powerful but not effective. It is not the Hamlet of tradition, nor does it overtop the traditional Hamlet in novelty and originality. If Salvini had played nothing but Hamlet here he never could have sustained the magnificent reputation he brought from foreign countries, and which he more than fulfilled in other parts. The man who excels as Ingomar, is superb as Samson, supreme in Othello, and, in the entirely opposite character of Sullivan , displays such marked comedy powers, can hardly be expected to shine as the melancholy Dane.

Rossi's Hamlet is effective if not powerful. In his first interview with the Ghost he betrays no fear, because he sees in it only the image of a lamented and beloved father, while in the scene with the Queen, when the Ghost appears, he crouches behind his mother's chair in abject terror, because, as he explains it, the phantom is then an embodiment of conscience, the Ghost of a father whose mandate he has disobeyed.

Unquestionably the imported Hamlet that has excited the greatest interest in New York in very many seasons is the Hamlet of Charles Fechter. The acting of no man, native or foreign, in the whole history of the American stage has been the subject of so much or of such varied criticism as his. There was no medium whatever concerning him in public opinion. Those who were his admirers were wildly enthusiastic in his praise; those who did not like him did not like him at all, and were unsparing in their condemnation and their ridicule; but no one was wholly indifferent to his acting. He came to this country endorsed by the strongest of letters from Charles Dickens, who was his friend, and weighted by the wholesale and impolitic puffery of his managers; the result was that, in the judgment of the majority of those who saw him, he did not and could not sustain the magnificent reputation claimed for him in his advance advertisements. On the other hand, while he was in a manner snubbed by New York, he was hailed in Boston as the Roscius of the nineteenth century. His Hamlet, although very uneven and unequal, was certainly a marvellous performance, and while by reason of date it does not come within the scope of the present chapter, it is too important in many ways to be omitted. It was thoroughly untraditional. He gave to the Prince of Denmark the fair Saxon face and the light flowing hair of the Danes of to-day; in his own portly form he made the too, too solid flesh of Hamlet a real rather than an ideal feature of Hamlet's person: and much of his business, if not original with him, was at least unfamiliar to American play-goers. He was peculiarly "intense" in everything he did, while in what are called the intense scenes of the tragedy he was often more subdued and natural even than Mr. Davenport, who was remarkably free from emotional acting. His "rest, perturb?d spirit," was excellent and effective by reason of its very quietness, and during all of the scene with the Ghost his acting was conspicuous by the absence of the conventional quivering, trembling, teeth-chattering agony which is so apt to be the result of the coming of the apparition. In the "rat-trap" and closet scenes, in which Mr. Booth is so good, so very excellent good, Mr. Fechter lacked dignity and repose; and in his advice to the players, while his reading was less distinct and intelligent than Mr. Booth's, his facial expression was wonderful and beyond all praise. He was inferior to Booth in the soliloquies, although charmingly tender in his intercourse with Ophelia. With the Queen in "the closet scene" he was almost brutal in his conduct, seeming to forget entirely--what Mr. Booth never overlooks--that Gertrude, although sinning, is still a woman and his own mother. He stabbed poor Polonius with a ferocity that destroyed all sympathy for Hamlet. His reading, apart from the accentuations and inflections which were natural to him at all times, was peculiar; his enunciation was frequently so rapid that it became unintelligible; he hurried through some of the finest passages at a gallop, and lost some of the finest points; but his Hamlet as a whole was impressive and magnetic, the oftener seen the better liked. Mr. Fechter made his first appearance in America as Ruy Blas at Niblo's Garden, New York, on the 10th of January, 1870, under the management of Jarrett & Palmer; and he played Hamlet for the first time on the 15th of February the same year.

Among the purely exotic Hamlets of the New York stage Salvini, Bandmann, Bogumil-Dawison, Rossi, Barnay, and Hasse have been the most prominent. But while the performance of each was excellent in its own fashion, each labored under the great disadvantage of playing a most familiar part in a foreign tongue.

As the limits of space here prevent more than the enumeration of the names of many men who were excellent Hamlets during the first century of its history in New York, so does the very nature of the article preclude any mention of the excellent Hamlets who have appeared in the part since the century closed in 1862, and who may be still alive. These no doubt will receive the attention of some later historian, who will do full justice to the Hamlets of the present and the future, from Henry Irving to N. S. Wood.

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited, have been in Hamlet's train upon the New York stage since "first from England he was here arrived," so many years ago; but so much has been said of Hamlet that even the names of his most beautiful Ophelias, his honest Ghosts, his gentle Guildensterns, his aunt-mothers, his uncle-fathers, his wretched, rash, intruding Polonii, or the absolute knaves who have digged his Ophelia's grave--and lied in it--for a hundred years, cannot be enumerated here, except when they have played Hamlet himself, or have done as somebody else some wonderful things to Hamlet.

One of the most notable instances of a great actor assuming a small part was on the occasion of Charles Kean's first appearance as Hamlet in Baltimore, when at the Holiday Street Theatre, in 1831, the elder Booth, at that time at the very height of his fame and prosperity, for some reason now unknown, volunteered to play the Second Actor, the most insignificant character in the tragedy. John Duff was the Ghost; Mrs. Duff Queen Gertrude; John Sefton Osric; Thomas Flynn First Grave-digger; and William Warren, father of the William Warren for whom Boston mourns to-day, was Polonius. This was an exceedingly strong cast of the tragedy, and the Second Actor most certainly was never in better hands on any stage.

CURTAIN.

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS.

Abbott, William, 282, 314.

Adams, Edwin, 200.

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