cuffs and collars, sitting behind him.
Then it is that the Romans say to themselves, Our aristocracy is not
yet dead.

Our colleagues, the de W.'s, had a _loge_ in the Argentina Theater and
invited us the other evening to go with them to see the great Salvini
in "Hamlet." The theater was filled to the uppermost galleries; you
could not have wedged in another person. The people in the audience,
when not applauding, were as silent as so many mice; this is unlike the
usual theater-going Italian, who reads and rustles his evening paper
all through the performance, looking up occasionally to hiss.

Salvini surpassed himself, perhaps on account of the presence of her
Majesty, whose eyes never wandered from the stage, except in the
_entr'actes_, when she responded to the ovation the public always makes
wherever she appears. She rose and bowed with her sweet smile, the
smile which wins all hearts.

There was only one hitch during the performance, and that was when
Hamlet and Polonius fought the duel; the latter, unfortunately, missed
his aim and speared Hamlet's wig with his sword, on which it stuck in
spite of the most desperate efforts to shake it off. Salvini, all
unconscious, continued fencing until he caught sight of his wig
dangling in the air and, realizing his un-Hamlet-like bald head, backed
out into the side-wing, leaving Polonius to get off the stage as best
he could.

In the _entr'acte_ Monsieur de W. and I talked over the play, and,
unfortunately, I said, "Did Hamlet ever exist?" A bomb exploding under
our noses could not have been more disastrous! He burst out in
indignant tones, and we almost came to literary blows in our violent
discussion. M. de W. insists upon it that Shakespeare knew all about
Hamlet and where he lived, the medieval clothes he wore, and that he
was the sepulchral Prince with whom we are so familiar; that Ophelia
was a very misused and unhappy young lady, who drowned herself in a
water-lily pond; and that Hamlet's papa used to come nights and scare
the life out of the courtiers.

"Wait a little," I said. "I flatter myself that I know the story of
Hamlet thoroughly. I spent all last summer studying the old Danish
chronicle, which was written in Latin in 1200 by a monk called Saxo
Grammaticus, then translated into old-fashioned Danish, which I
translated, to amuse myself, into English. If what Saxo says is true
Hamlet lived about two or three hundred years before Christ."

"Impossible!"