ott,
and the maid-of-all-work by Arthur Herapath. As for the walking
gentlemen, cabmen, detective, _et hoc genus omne_, they were doled out
to anyone who chose to take them. There had been no regular rehearsals
yet, but private preparation, of the hole-and-corner kind I have
described, had been going on for a week or so. The actors themselves
had been looking forward with eagerness--not to say trepidation--to the
first rehearsal, which was appointed to take place this evening in the
Fourth class-room, in the presence of Wake and Stafford, and a few other
formidable critics of the upper school. Great, therefore, was the
dismay when it was rumoured that the low comedian and the maid-of-all-
work were on the sick list with a doctor's certificate.

The first impulse was to postpone the date, but on Wake representing
that there was no evening for ten days on which they could get the use
of the room, it was resolved to do the best they could with the parts
they had, and read the missing speeches from the book. Although the
house generally was excluded from the rehearsals, the Fourth-form boys
managed to scramble in on the strength of the class-room in which the
performance was to take place being their own. And besides the invited
guests named above, it was frequently found, at the end of a
performance, when the gas was turned up, that the room was fuller of
Juniors and Babies than it had been when the curtain rose.

On the present occasion, not being a full-dress rehearsal, there was no
curtain, nor was there anything to distinguish the actors from their
hearers, save the importance of their faces and the evident nervousness
with which they awaited the signal to begin.

And here let me give my readers a piece of information. A screaming
farce is ever so much more difficult to act than a tragedy of
Shakespeare. Any--well, any duffer can act Brutus or Richard the Third
or the Ghost of Banquo, but it is reserved only to a few to be able to
do justice to the parts of Bartholomew Bumblebee or Miss Anastatia
Acidrop. And when one comes to compare the paltry exploits and dull
observations of the old tragedy heroes with the noble wit and sublime
actions of their modern rivals it is not to be wondered at! So it
happened on the present occasion.

_After You_ was far too ambitious a flight for the Comedians at
Railsford's; they had far better have stuck to _King Lear_. In the
first place, none of the characters seemed to