part with half a dozen shillings. Luxurious seats of red velvet, wide
enough for a pair of German contraltos, invite to slumber, and the
juggler on the stage does the rest. Twenty times he heaves a cannon ball
into the air, and twenty times he catches it safely on his neck. The
Russian dancer, we find, is booked for ten-thirty, and it is now but
eight-fifty. "Why wait?" says the fair Elsie. "It will never kill him."
So we try another hall--and find a lady with a face like a tomato
singing a song about the derby, to an American tune that was stale in
1907. Yet another, and we are in the midst of a tedious ballet founded
upon "Carmen," with the music reduced to jigtime and a flute playing out
of tune. A fourth--and we suffer a pair of comedians who impersonate
Americans by saying "Naow" and "Amurican." When they break into "My
Cousin Carus'" we depart by the fire escape. We have now spent eight
dollars on divertisement and have failed to be diverted. We take one
more chance, and pick a prize--Little Tich, to wit, a harlequin no more
than four feet in his shoes, but as full of humour as a fraternal order
funeral.

Before these few lines find you well, Little Tich, I dare say, will be
on Broadway, drawing his four thousand stage dollars a week and longing
for a decent cut of mutton. But we saw him on his native heath,
uncontaminated by press agents, unboomed by a vociferous press,
undefiled by contact with acquitted murderers, eminent divorcees,
"perfect" women, returned explorers who never got where they went, and
suchlike prodigies and nuisances of the Broadway 'alls. Tich, as I have
said, is but four feet from sole to crown, but there is little of the
dwarf's distortion about him. He is simply a man in miniature: in
aspect, much like any other man. His specialty is impersonation. First
he appears as a drill sergeant, then as a headwaiter, then as a gas
collector, then as some other familiar fellow. But what keen insight and
penetrating humour in every detail of the picture! How mirth bubbles
out! Here we have burlesque, of course, and there is even some horseplay
in it, but at bottom how deft it is, and how close to life, and how
wholly and irresistibly comical! You must see him do the
headwaiter--hear him blarney and flabbergast the complaining guest,
observe him reckon up his criminal bill, see the subtle condescension of
his tip grabbing. This Tich, I assure you, is no common mountebank, but
a first-rate comic actor.