advantages that nature has heaped upon her with no sparing hand.' The
natural advantages that nature has heaped upon me! 'And perhaps, also,'
he went on to say, 'Miss White would do well to pay some little more
attention before venturing on pronouncing the classic names of Greece.
Iphigenia herself would not have answered to her name if she had heard
it pronounced with the accent on the fourth syllable.'"

Macleod brought his fist down on the table with a bang.

"If I had that fellow," said he, aloud--"if I had that fellow, I should
like to spin for a shark off Dubh Artach lighthouse." And here a most
unholy vision rose before him of a new sort of sport--a sailing launch
going about six knots an hour, a goodly rope at the stern with a huge
hook through the gill of the luckless critic, a swivel to make him spin,
and then a few smart trips up and down by the side of the lonely Dubh
Artach rocks, where Mr. Ewing and his companions occasionally find a few
sharks coming up to the surface to stare at them.

"Is it not too ridiculous that such things should vex me--that I should
be so absolutely at the mercy of the opinion of people whose judgment I
know to be absolutely valueless? I find the same thing all around me. I
find a middle-aged man, who knows his work thoroughly, and has seen all
the best actors of the past quarter of a century, will go about quite
proudly with a scrap of approval from some newspaper, written by a young
man who has never travelled beyond the suburbs of his native town, and
has seen no acting beyond that of the local company. But there is
another sort of critic--the veteran, the man who has worked hard on the
paper and worn himself out, and who is turned off from politics, and
pensioned by being allowed to display his imbecility in less important
matters. Oh dear! what lessons he reads you! The solemnity of them!
Don't you know that at the end of the second act the business of Mrs.
So-and-So (some actress who died when George IV. was king) was this,
that, or the other?--and how dare you, you impertinent minx, fly in the
face of well-known stage traditions? I have been introduced lately to a
specimen of both classes. I think the young man--he had beautiful long
fair hair and a Byronic collar, and was a little nervous--fell in love
with me, for he wrote a furious panegyric of me, and sent it next
morning with a bouquet, and begged for my photograph. The elderly
gentleman, on the other hand, gave me a