he found a thousand exercises for his ingenuity and taste, a
thousand problems arising which he delighted to study, a thousand
opportunities to make those infinitesimal improvements which are so much
in art and for the artist. Our first Greek play had been costumed by the
professional costumier, with unforgettable results of comicality and
indecorum; the second, the _Trachiniae_ of Sophocles, he took in hand
himself, and a delightful task he made of it. His study was then in
antiquarian books, where he found confusion, and on statues and
bas-reliefs, where he at last found clearness; after an hour or so at
the British Museum he was able to master "the chiton, sleeves and all";
and before the time was ripe he had a theory of Greek tailoring at his
fingers' ends, and had all the costumes made under his eye as a Greek
tailor would have made them. "The Greeks made the best plays and the
best statues, and were the best architects; of course, they were the
best tailors too," said he; and was never weary, when he could find a
tolerant listener, of dwelling on the simplicity, the economy, the
elegance both of means and effect, which made their system so
delightful.

But there is another side to the stage-manager's employment. The
discipline of acting is detestable; the failures and triumphs of that
business appeal too directly to the vanity; and even in the course of a
careful amateur performance such as ours, much of the smaller side of
man will be displayed. Fleeming, among conflicting vanities and
levities, played his part to my admiration. He had his own view; he
might be wrong; but the performances (he would remind us) were after all
his, and he must decide. He was, in this as in all other things, an iron
taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others. If you were going to do it
at all, he would see that it was done as well as you were able. I have
known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the
same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon.
And yet he gained and retained warm feelings from far the most of those
who fell under his domination, and particularly (it is pleasant to
remember) from the girls. After the slipshod training and the incomplete
accomplishments of a girls' school, there was something at first
annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high standard of
accomplishment and perseverance.

III

It did not matter why he entered upon any study or empl