ething
this week!" and his plausible reply of, "Certainly, certainly, my good
people, you shall be attended to directly." Then he would go into the
treasury, sweep it clean of the whole week's receipts (the salaries of
the principal actors, whom he dared not offend and could not dispense
with, being, if not wholly, partially paid), and, going out of the
building another way, leave the poor people who had cried to him for
their arrears of wages baffled and cheated of the price of their labor
for another week. The picture was not a pleasant one.

When I first knew Caroline Sheridan, she had not long been married to
the Hon. George Norton. She was splendidly handsome, of an un-English
character of beauty, her rather large and heavy head and features
recalling the grandest Grecian and Italian models, to the latter of whom
her rich coloring and blue-black braids of hair gave her an additional
resemblance. Though neither as perfectly lovely as the Duchess of
Somerset, nor as perfectly charming as Lady Dufferin, she produced a far
more striking impression than either of them, by the combination of the
poetical genius with which she alone, of the three, was gifted, with the
brilliant wit and power of repartee which they (especially Lady
Dufferin) possessed in common with her, united to the exceptional beauty
with which they were all three endowed. Mrs. Norton was extremely
epigrammatic in her talk, and comically dramatic in her manner of
narrating things. I do not know whether she had any theatrical talent,
though she sang pathetic and humorous songs admirably, and I remember
shaking in my shoes when, soon after I came out, she told me she envied
me, and would give anything to try the stage herself. I thought, as I
looked at her wonderful, beautiful face, "Oh, if you should, what would
become of me!" She was no musician, but had a deep, sweet contralto
voice, precisely the same in which she always spoke, and which, combined
with her always lowered eyelids ("downy eyelids" with sweeping silken
fringes), gave such incomparably comic effect to her sharp retorts and
ludicrous stories; and she sang with great effect her own and Lady
Dufferin's social satires, "Fanny Grey," and "Miss Myrtle," etc., and
sentimental songs like "Would I were with Thee," "I dreamt 'twas but a
Dream," etc., of which the words were her own, and the music, which only
amounted to a few chords with the simplest modulations, her own also. I
remember she used o