rated, "What can I do? You have
always known that 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark,' and
yet you have let these poor innocents stir it up. I have often thought
that poor Shakespeare added that line after the first performance. I
intend to write that hint to Furniss one of these days."

"You will write it," said Margaret Masters, "with more conviction after
you have seen _my_ Denmark."

"Very well," said he, "I'll visit Elsinore to-night, but I insist upon a
return ticket."

"You will be begging for a season ticket," she laughed. "They have
reduced me to such a condition that I don't know whether they are
amusing me or breaking my heart. Tell me, come, which is it? Did you
ever hear blank verse recited with tense and reverent earnestness and a
Bowery accent?"

"I never did," said he.

* * * * *

"Shakespeare was right," whispered Burgess to Miss Masters. "There is
something rotten in Denmark. I've located it. It's the Prince." They
were sitting together in a corner of the kindergarten room of the
settlement: a large and spacious room all decked and bright with the
paper and cardboard masterpieces of the babies who played and learned
there in the mornings. Casts and pictures and green growing things added
to its charm and the Lady Hyacinths so trim and neat and earnest did not
detract from it.

The sewing-machines and the cutting-table had been cast into corners and
well in the glare of the electric light the President was exclaiming in
a voice which would have disgraced an early phonograph, "Oh that this
too too solid flesh would melt."

It was not a dress rehearsal but the too solid Prince wore his hair low
on his neck and a golden fillet bound his brows. Silent, he was noble.
His walk as he came in at the end of a procession of court ladies and
gentlemen was magnificent--slow, dejected, imperious, aloof. But
Wittenberg had a great deal to answer for, if he had contracted his
accent there.

Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, was a Hyacinth who worked daily at hooks and
buttonholes for an East Broadway tailor. On this night she wore none of
her regalia save her crown and the King had done nothing at all to
differentiate himself from Susie Lacov who officiated as waitress in a
Jewish lunchroom.

The Hyacinths had wisely decided to edit Hamlet. In this they followed
an almost universal principle and their method was also time-honored.
All the scenes in which unimportant mem