s kind of thing, but I
confess that I don't care much for a representation of the Judgment
Day in a melodrama of low life. Of course low life has just as much
right as any other sort of life to be represented in a Judgment
Day scene; but it ought to behave itself there and not introduce
back-chat.

I should explain that it was a special Suicide Court, and that the
object of _The Magister_, as the Presiding Judge was named in the
programme, was to inquire into the record of the delinquent and, if
his answers were satisfactory, to allow him to revisit the scenes of
his earthly life in order to repair any little omissions that he might
have made in the hurry of departure. Unfortunately the leading case
was a bad example of suicide. It had not been deliberate; he had
simply killed himself impromptu in a tight corner to avoid arrest for
intended murder.

Worse still, when he returned to earth after a lapse of fourteen
years' purgatory (between the sixth and seventh scenes), for his
record was a rotten one and he had shown no signs of penitence, the
_revenant_ made very poor use of his hour. Returning to his wife whom
he had brutalised, he found that she had taught their girl-child to
regard him as a paragon of virtue, and most of his limited time was
spent in correcting this beautiful legend. You see, at the time of his
death he had had no chance of making the child realise how bad he was,
for the excellent reason that she had not yet been born, so he seized
this opportunity of making good that omission.

As a practical illustration of the kind of man he really had been, he
struck the child violently on the arm. We all saw him do it and we
all heard the smack, but the child assured us that she had not felt
anything. This I suppose was the author's way, ingenuous enough, of
reminding us that it was a case of spirit and not of flesh, whatever
our eyes and ears might persuade us to think of it.

Already in a previous scene there had been the same old difficulty.
While the man lay dead on his bed his spirit had been summoned by
a Higher Power (indicated in a peep-show), and his corpse sat up,
displacing the prostrate form of the widow, who had to take up a new
position, without however appearing to notice anything. It was still
sitting up when the curtain fell, and incidentally was caught in the
act of resuming its recumbent position when the curtain rose again for
the purpose of allowing the actors to receive our respectfu