Appropriate to the holiday season the principal play staged was the ever-new “Cinderella,” in which Miss Mary Jaseph (Mrs. John H. Wade) played the title part, with Miss Mollie Archer (Mrs. Schmuck-Hofmeister) as the fairy godmother whose wand of enchantment wrought its miracle over the pumpkin. Mrs. John H. Thompson (Margaret Patterson), Misses Hattie Patterson (Mrs. Simeon Jasepb, Jr.), and Madge Armstrong ( . Edwin R. Hatfield) enacted the cruel stepmother and haughty stepsisters. Palmer Smith and William Huckeby Ferguson were popular comic singers, and the closing tableau, “The Death of Minnehaha” was accompanied by a musical recitative, Miss Isabelle Huckeby (Mrs. de la Hunt) having composed her own setting to Longfellow’s poetry, a melody of surpassing pathos, never given to publication.

Several of the same performers, with many others, took part in a similar entertainment during the same winter, in aid of the Methodist Church; and for the benefit of St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, which had been damaged by fire, the most ambitious histrionic effort ever attempted in Cannelton was produced early in May, an abridgment of the “Merchant of Venice,” rehearsed and staged under the personal supervision of Mrs. Hamilton Smith (Louise Rudd) .

A literary club giving particular attention to Shakspere had existed for one or two winters among the young people, humorously styled “The Parsonage Literary Institute,” with the Rev. William Louis Githens at its head, so that Mrs. Smith found plastic material ready for her moulding hand. Shylock, Joseph W. Snow; Duke, Edwin R. Hatfield; Bassanio, Sidney B. Hatfield; Antonio, Thomas James de la Hunt; Portia, Miss Isabelle Huckeby; and Nerissa, Miss Margaret Armstrong, were the leading characters of the cast. Contemporary accounts give high praise to the rendition, especially the Trial Scene, where the fair young doctor, the “wise and excellent young man,” delivered, with beautiful conception of masculine strength made subservient to the delicate perception and unbounded love of a cultured woman, that matchless appeal for mercy, the noblest lines ever penned by “sweetest Shakespear, Fancies childe.” An element of romance underlay it all, by no means lost upon the audience of familiar friends who afterward accused Antonio of being more captivated by the curling ringlets escaping below Portia’s hood, and the bewitching sweetness of her undisguised accents, than by the acumen of her legal pleading. A double bill was invariably expected by the audience, so the perennial “Mistletoe Bough” was given as the afterpiece, Miss Mollie Archer winning unbounded compliments by her charmingly attractive delineation of Ginevra the Missing Bride.