tage child does not go rampaging about a house and screeching and
yelling till nobody knows whether they are on their heads or their
heels.

A stage child does not get up at five o'clock in the morning to practice
playing on a penny whistle. A stage child never wants a bicycle and
drives you mad about it. A stage child does not ask twenty complicated
questions a minute about things that you don't understand, and then
wind up by asking why you don't seem to know anything, and why wouldn't
anybody teach you anything when you were a little boy.

The stage child does not wear a hole in the seat of its knickerbockers
and have to have a patch let in. The stage child comes downstairs on its
feet.

The stage child never brings home six other children to play at horses
in the front garden, and then wants to know if they can all come in to
tea. The stage child never has the wooping-cough, and the measles, and
every other disease that it can lay its hands on, and be laid up with
them one after the other and turn the house upside down.

The stage child's department in the scheme of life is to harrow up its
mother's feelings by ill-timed and uncalled-for questions about its
father. It always wants to know, before a roomful of people, where "dear
papa" is, and why he has left dear mamma; when, as all the guests know,
the poor man is doing his two years' hard or waiting to be hanged. It
makes everybody so uncomfortable.

It is always harrowing up somebody--the stage child; it really ought
not to be left about as it is. When it has done upsetting its mother it
fishes out some broken-hearted maid, who has just been cruelly severed
forever from her lover, and asks her in a high falsetto voice why she
doesn't get married, and prattles to her about love, and domestic
bliss, and young men, and any other subject it can think of particularly
calculated to lacerate the poor girl's heart until her brain nearly
gives way.

After that it runs amuck up and down the whole play and makes everybody
sit up all round. It asks eminently respectable old maids if they
wouldn't like to have a baby; and it wants to know why bald-headed old
men have left off wearing hair, and why other old gentlemen have red
noses and if they were always that color.

In some plays it so happens that the less said about the origin and
source of the stage child the better; and in such cases nothing will
appear so important to that contrary brat as to know, in the middl