ws with her lover remains unrecognized--a
diaphanous literary invention that must have been old when the Pyramids
were young. The heroine's small brother, with playful archaicism called
"a springald," puts on her skirts and things and passes himself off for
his sister or anybody else he pleases. In brief, there is no puerility
that is not at home in this sphere of misbegotten effort. Listen--a
priest, a princess, and a young man in woman's clothes are on the scene:

\ The princess rose to her feet and
approached the priest.
\ "Father," she said swiftly, "this
is not the Lady Joan, my brother's
wife, but a youth marvelously like
her, who hath offered himself in
her place that she might escape. . . .
He is the Count von Loen, a lord
of Kernsburg. And I love him. We
want you to marry us now, dear
Father--now, without a moment's
delay; for if you do not they will
kill him, and I shall have to marry
Prince Wasp!"

This is from "Joan of the Sword Hand," and if ever I read a more silly
performance I have forgotten it.

POOR YORICK

THERE is extant in the city of New York an odd piece of bric-a-brac
which I am sometimes tempted to wish was in my own possession. On a
bracket in Edwin Booth's bedroom at The Players--the apartment remains
as he left it that solemn June day ten years ago--stands a sadly
dilapidated skull which the elder Booth, and afterward his son Edwin,
used to soliloquize over in the graveyard at Elsinore in the fifth act
of "Hamlet."

A skull is an object that always invokes interest more or less poignant;
it always has its pathetic story, whether told or untold; but this skull
is especially a skull "with a past."

In the early forties, while playing an engagement somewhere in the wild
West, Junius Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a particularly
undeserving fellow, the name of him unknown to us. The man, as it
seemed, was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer, and highwayman--in
brief, a miscellaneous desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sort
of person likely to touch the sympathies of the half-mad player. In the
course of nature or the law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodily
disappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist even as a reminiscence in
the florid mind of his sometime benefactor.

As the elder Booth was seated at breakfast one morning in a hotel in
Louisville, Kentucky,