sy-chairs, so that they can sit about
in picturesque attitudes and do it comfortably. Or if they want to do
it out of doors they have a ruined abbey, with a big stone seat in the
center, and moonlight.

The comic lovers, on the other hand, have to do it standing up all the
time, in busy streets, or in cheerless-looking and curiously narrow
rooms in which there is no furniture whatever and no fire.

And there is always a tremendous row going on in the house when the
comic lovers are making love. Somebody always seems to be putting up
pictures in the next room, and putting them up boisterously, too, so
that the comic lovers have to shout at each other.

THE PEASANTS.

They are so clean. We have seen peasantry off the stage, and it
has presented an untidy--occasionally a disreputable and
unwashed--appearance; but the stage peasant seems to spend all his wages
on soap and hair-oil.

They are always round the corner--or rather round the two corners--and
they come on in a couple of streams and meet in the center; and when
they are in their proper position they smile.

There is nothing like the stage peasants' smile in this world--nothing
so perfectly inane, so calmly imbecile.

They are so happy. They don't look it, but we know they are because they
say so. If you don't believe them, they dance three steps to the right
and three steps to the left back again. They can't help it. It is
because they are so happy.

When they are more than usually rollicking they stand in a semicircle,
with their hands on each other's shoulders, and sway from side to side,
trying to make themselves sick. But this is only when they are simply
bursting with joy.

Stage peasants never have any work to do.

Sometimes we see them going to work, sometimes coming home from work,
but nobody has ever seen them actually at work. They could not afford to
work--it would spoil their clothes.

They are very sympathetic, are stage peasants. They never seem to have
any affairs of their own to think about, but they make up for this by
taking a three-hundred-horse-power interest in things in which they have
no earthly concern.

What particularly rouses them is the heroine's love affairs. They could
listen to them all day.

They yearn to hear what she said to him and to be told what he replied
to her, and they repeat it to each other.

In our own love-sick days we often used to go and relate to various
people all the touching conversations t