It is very remarkable that English and American puffing has quite disappeared here. The earnestness and application of the German character are betrayed even in the typographical arrangement of this newspaper for acrobats. It is as clearly and carefully printed as a catalogue of the Leipzic libraries. The biographical notices, announcements of death, column of accidents, the _Varietebühnen_ are compiled with scrupulous care and exactitude. This curious publication even finds space for literature, and the last number of the _Artist_ published as a supplement _Damons Walten_, a novel, by Otto von Ellendorf. It is easy to appreciate the services which these and similar newspapers are able to confer upon the _banquistes_.
[Illustration: _Der Artist_, 4. Decémber 1887.]
"To tell the truth," one of the confraternity said to me one [p010] day, "in the whole world we have no other home but the little pigeon-hole of advertisements, where those who know us go and ask for news of us, where they learn the history of our engagements, our successes, our accidents, our marriage, the birth of our children, or the tidings of our death."
Between the artist who seeks for an engagement and the manager always on the look out for an extraordinary "novelty," a third person necessarily intervenes, the middleman, who arises everywhere between buyer and seller.
And, in fact, at the present time all the principal cities of the world have their agents for performing artists of every kind. These personages are very important, and make large profits. Those best known on the Continent are Messrs. Paravicini and Warner, of London; Hitzig and Wulff, of Berlin; Wild, of Vienna; Rosinsky, of Paris; Nael Salsbury, of New York, who, during the Exhibition of 1889, has shown the Parisians the savage life of the "Wild West," transported to Paris in the persons of the celebrated Buffalo-Bill and his Indians.
The history of the Rosinsky agency is worth narration, for it is now so flourishing that it has replaced, to the advantage of Paris, the engagement market which formerly existed in London.
You can imagine that a man would not open an agency of this kind without first passing through many vicissitudes, and, in fact, R. Rosinsky has had a most checkered life.