Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 February 1898 — LITTLE LOTTA. [ARTICLE]

LITTLE LOTTA.

Tl* e Old-Time Favorite Is Happily Resting in Retirement. It Is given to few actresses to retire gracefully from the stage. In fact. It might almost be said of them that none resign. Y’esterday, however, says a New York correspondent of the Chicago Chronicle, I ran across the case of an actress, second to none in America in her day, who has contrived to retire from the stage without unseemly talk and to stay away from it in the peaceful contemplation of a life of perfect privacy and quiet. Lotta is happy to be Miss Crabtree now and until she dies. She loved her calling when the country rang with her praises, but she has no regrets, or, if she has, conceals them thoroughly from her most intimate friends. Her disposition is sunshiny, and those of you who remember her, let us say, as “Musette,” can understand what I mean when I say that Lotta is “Musette” still, cheerful childish iu a sweet, unaffected way, devoted to her mother first of all and always, and rejoicing in her old friends, for she makes few new ones now. Miss Crabtree’s devotion to her mother is a source of delight to those who are privileged to see it. She has concentrated her affection—and she is full of it—upon the dear old lady. This live is all returned, and the two are almost inseparable. The other day Miss Crabtree—l can hardly resist calling her Lotta—much against her will, had to leave her mother for the best part of the day. The cruel man who caused this separation was the agent looks after the renting of the flat bi/ldings in Upper New York which belong to Miss Crabtree. He insisted upon her inspecting her property. Her description of the tour afterward was awfully funny. She saw the amusing side of everything—even the janitors failed to depress her spirits.

Miss Crabtree is a very wealthy woman, which makes her simplicity of life anil the pleasure she finds in it the more remarkable. “There is a halo of happiness about that little red head,” said one of her best friends to- me the other day, “and she keeps it aglow, I believe, by thinkiug most of the time of others, and especially of her mother. She has a beautiful home here in New York, and she stays in it a great deal longer every year than one of her medns in this part of the world usually does.” Lotta will never return to the stage, and it Is a privilege to be able to recall her charming impersonations, but I can not help feeling that if she had been born a generation later and then found some one to direct her artistic instincts in a proper way, she would have achieved greater triumphs and left upon the public a deeper impression. Her genius was never extended fully. The plays in which she appeared were the veriest trash. She shone in spite of them. We remember Lotta in this character or that, but the very names of the plays to which they belonged are fast being forgotten. But what does it matter to Lotta, still the darling of every one who saw her, and, most of all, beloved by her own sex, “though lost to sight to memory dear?” So Lotta the actress retired without regrets to Lotta the constant cricket of her own happy hearth.