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What a Woman Says About Buffalo Bill.
On the occasion of Mr. Cody's visit to San Franciso last April, she devoted a column to the famous scout who appears here to-morrow night. Among other things she said: "What would not Frank Mayo give for this genuine frontier accent, which hangs upon the lips of Buffalo Bill, and will not away. You can follow his observation of men and manners with every trick of the stage drawing room which he assumes. You can see just how he was first stage struck by the roll of his r's. You can tell the sort of men he likes by his cultivation of imperturbable sang-froid. It is odd to watch how transparently the consciousness of the man shows all through it. When he shakes his head like a young bison, you feel that he is conscious, of his Absolom locks; when he sits on his horse and strains his eye to look over the prairie, you can realize that every detail of the costume, every pose of the figure, has been studied. In an actor this is well and right. In Buffalo Bill perhaps this is well and right, too, but you have an odd feeling that, being as he is a genuine child of the prairies, this homelight, this playing up to a curtain; this pandering to a shouting, screaming, whistling gallery, make him an apostate of nature. But the gallery likes it, the people like it, and I know Buffalo Bill likes it. He is a big, handsome, strong, young fellow, and he has many accomplishments. He can snap a whip in such a way that everyone jumps and think an Alcatraz cannon has gone off. He handles a bowie-knife like a Corsican. A heavy revolver is simply a gleaming toy in his hands, and he swings a rifle around as if it were a ribbon. How the boys' eyes gleam and shine from the gallery: how their young hearts swell and long for Injuns and highwayman, and the punishment of villains; how in fact, they all yearn to be Buffalo Bills.
We had looked on many a play on the boards of the California theatre, but we all came to the conclusions that we had never met with such a wealth of incident in any one of those plays as in "May Cody" nor any actor who so thoroughly played [word?] as Buffalo Bill.
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