curtains which were
ambitious and effective, though I thought him a little reckless both
about good drawing and good clothes. His glue-kettles and size-pots
were always steaming, his paint was on many and more inappropriate
objects than the canvas. A shilling's-worth of gilding powder went
such a long way that we had not only golden crowns and golden
sceptres, and golden chains for our dungeon, and golden wings for our
fairies, but the nursery furniture became irregularly and
unintentionally gilded, as well as nurse's stuff dress, when she sat
on a warrior's shield, which was drying in the rocking-chair.

But these were small matters. Philip gave us a wonderful account of
the "properties" he had made for school theatricals. A dragon painted
to the life, and with matches so fixed into the tip of him that the
boy who acted as the life and soul of this ungainly carcase could wag
a fiery tail before the amazed audience, by striking it on that
particular scale of his dragon's skin which was made of sand-paper.
Rabbit-skin masks, cotton-wool wigs and wigs of tow, seven-league
boots, and witches' hats, thunder with a tea-tray, and all the phases
of the moon with a moderator lamp--with all these things Philip
enriched the school theatre, though for some time he would not take so
much trouble for our own.

But during this last half he had written me three letters--and three
very kind ones. In the latest he said that--partly because he had been
making some things for us, and partly because of changes in the
school-theatrical affairs--he should bring home with him a box of very
valuable "properties" for our use at Christmas. He charged me at once
to prepare a piece which should include a prince disguised as a woolly
beast on two legs with large fore-paws (easily shaken off), a fairy
godmother with a tow wig and the highest hat I could ever hope to see,
a princess turned into a willow-tree (painted from memory of the old
one at home), and with fine gnarls and knots, through which the
princess could see everything, and prompt (if needful), a disconsolate
parent, and a faithful attendant, to be acted by one person, with as
many belated travellers as the same actor could personate into the
bargain. These would all be eaten up by the dragon at the right wing,
and re-enter more belated than ever at the left, without stopping
longer than was required to roll a peal of thunder at the back. The
fifth and last character was to be the drag