'This is the regulation kind of thing, Chris,' he said to me in a low voice--'this is the stuff that draws the twopenny gallery.'

And he turned, with much affability, and accepted a pewter-pot offered to him by a brother with a 'Here, Cully!' and drank a deep draught. Then he took me into the passage, and asked some person in authority to pass me into the theatre. The people were pouring in at all the entrances, and in a short time the house was completely filled. They were fully bent upon enjoying themselves, and began to kick and applaud directly they were seated. When the lights were turned up and a bright blaze broke upon the living sea of faces, there was a roar of delight; and as the musicians straggled into the orchestra, they were greeted with applause and exclamations of familiarity, which fell upon ears supremely indifferent. I was placed in a good position, where I had a capital view of the stage, and having purchased a playbill, I began to study it. The programme was an imposing one, and the occupants of the twopenny gallery could certainly not complain that they did not have enough for their money. First, there was the romantic melodrama of The Knight of the Sable Plume, in which that distinguished actor, Mr. Horace Saint Herbert Fitzherbert (pronounced by the entire press to be superior to the elder Kean, and to surpass Garrick), would sustain the principal character. To be followed by the thrilling drama of The Lonely Murder at the Wayside Inn. After which, a comic song by Sam Jacobs, entitled the 'Jolly Drunken Cobbler,' and the clog hornpipe, by Mr. Dicksey. The whole to conclude with the stirring domestic drama of The Trials and Vicissitudes of a Servant-Girl; winding up with a grand allegorical tableau in coloured fires. The appetite that could have found fault with the quantity must surely have been unappeasable. In due time the music ceases, a bell rings, there is a moment's breathless expectation in the house, and the curtain rises on The Knight of the Sable Plume. Scene the first: A wood. In the distance, the battlemented castle of Plantagenet the Ruthless. (So says the programme, but I cannot see the battlemented castle, although I strain my eyes to discern it, being interested in it as the family residence of my friend Turk.) Enter two ruffians in leather jerkins and buff gloves. Times are very bad with them. They want gold, they want blood, and--ahr! they want revenge (with a redundancy of r's). They roll their eyes, they gnash their teeth. Yonder is the castle of Plantagenet. There sits the lordly tyrant who grinds his vassals to the dust. Shall he be allowed to go on in his ruthless course unchecked? No! Hark! a thousand echoes reiterate the declaration. (I fancy the echoes.) No no! no! They kneel, and swear revenge in dumb show. Who comes here? As they live, it is the lovely Edith, the heiress to those baronial halls. The Fates are propitious. They'll tear her from the domestic hearth, and bear her senseless form to mountains wild. Exit ruffians elaborately. Enter Edith pensively. She is pretty, and she receives a round of applause from all parts of the house. She bows, and tells the audience that she has just dismounted from her snow-white palfrey outside. This accounts for her coming in without a hat, and with her hair hanging down her back over a white-muslin frock. The sparkling foliage of the trees tempted her to stroll along the mossy sward. She sighs. Who is the stranger she met nine days ago upon this very spot? She did not speak to him, she did not see his face, but the beating of her heart, the clouds athwart the sky, the dew upon the grass, the whisper of the breeze, the beauteous birds that warble delicious notes to scented flowers, all, all whisper to her that she loves him. Ah, yes, she loves him! Could she but see once more his manly form, she'd die content. Cue to the musicians, with whose assistance Edith sings a plaintive song expressive of her wish To quit the sordid world, And with her love be whirled To other lands. On sorrow bent (she sings), I'd die content If he were by my side. Oh, take me, love, To realms above, And let me be thy bride. The ruffians enter at the back of the stage, and roam about with stealthy steps. They draw their knives, and breathe upon them. Expectation is in every eye. The ruffians advance. The high-born maiden continues her song. The ruffians retreat. The high-born concludes her song with a tra-la-la. The ruffians, having just made up their minds at that point, advance again, with a quick sliding movement. Seize her! Oh, spare me, spare me she cries. Spare you, daughter of Plantagenet the Ruthless! spare you! Never! Did thy gory sire spare my white-haired parent when, with his bloody sword, he clove him from head to foot, and laid him writhing in the dust? Spare you! Not if lightnings flashed and thunders rolled, not if all the powers of earth and air interpose their forms protecting, shall you be spared! Revenge! The music is worked up terrifically during the scene. The ruffians drag the maiden this way and that, evidently undecided as to which road they shall take to their mountains wild. They seem bent upon rending her lovely form into small pieces and running off the opposite sides of the stage with the fragments. Help, oh, help me! she cries. A sudden tumult is heard without. Make way there, make way! is heard, at least two yards from the spot. She shrieks more loudly. I hear his lovèd step without! she cries. And the next moment a figure clad in armour rushes in, and with one blow lays the two ruffians dead upon the stage. His visor is down, and towering in his helmet is a sable plume. It is he, the Knight of the Sable Plume! He supports Edith on one arm; he raises the other aloft to the skies, and the curtain drops upon the picture amidst the admiring plaudits of the audience. Vociferous cries for Fitz! Fitz! bring that hero to the front of the curtain, where he gracefully bows, and wipes his brow languidly with a cambric handkerchief The second act introduces my friend Turk West, in the character of Plantagenet. I am glad to find that he is a favourite with the audience, who clap their hands, and two or three profane ones cry out, 'Bravo, Turk! Go in and win!' I am not aware whether this is a stimulant to him, but he certainly 'goes in' with vigour. The scene in which he appears is described as the grand hall in the castle, and its appointments are two chairs and a brown wooden table of modern manufacture. Very ruthless and very fierce indeed does Turk look, and he is accompanied by the pair of dead ruffians, who now appear as retainers: I recognise them by their buff boots. It is in vain that I endeavour to unravel the plot; the threads slip from me directly I attempt to gather them together. From a lengthy soliloquy indulged in by Plantagenet, I learn that he is not the rightful owner of the battlemented castle. Seventeen years ago he killed a noble prince in cold blood (which popular phrase cannot be a correct one), and murdered his beautiful child, the last, last scion of a noble race. (Here Turk grows magnificent, and 'goes in' with a will.) Oh, agony! He beholds once more their mangled corpses, he sees the death-sweat br-reaking on their brows! The demon of remorse is tearing at his vitals. Oh, would he could recall the past, and restore the two wooden chairs and the table to their rightful owner! During the applause that follows, Turk winks at me, and I am delighted. The low-comedy man and a waiting-maid in short petticoats and wearing an embroidered apron, as was the fashion with waiting-maids in the days of chivalry, play important comic parts in the piece, and send the audience into convulsions of laughter. But the plot has quite baffled me, and I have given up all hope of unravelling it. The Knight of the Sable Plume has been thrown into prison by Plantagenet, after a desperate fight with eight retainers (in slippers), and is released by the hand of the lovely Edith, to whom he swears eternal fealty. The last scene is the same as the first--a wood, with the (invisible) battlemented castle in the distance. Plantagenet the Ruthless enters. He is mad with rage. His prisoner has escaped. He gnashes his teeth. He'll search the wide world through but he will find him. Usurper! ye search not long. Behold him here! He enters, the Knight of the Sable Plume. At length we stand front to front! Back to thy teeth thy lying words! Villain! Defend thyself! They fight to music. One, two, up; one, two, down; one, two, three, four, sideways. They turn round, and when they are face to face, they clash their swords terrifically. They lock their arms together, and fight that way. The gallant knight is getting the worst of it. He is forced first upon one knee, then upon the other. He fights round the stage in this position. By a herculean effort he gains his feet. The swords flash fire. Ah, the usurper yields! He stumbles. He lies prostrate on the ground. Over him glares the knight. Recreant, beg thy miserable life! Never! Die, then, remorseless tyrant! With a piercing shriek Edith rushes in, and cries, Spare him, oh, spare him; he is my father! The Knight of the Sable Plume is softened; his sword drops from his grasp. He kneels, and supports the head of the Ruthless. It is too late; Death has marked me for his own, says Turk. The knight raises his visor. Ah! what is that scar upon thy brow? cries Turk. Avenging heaven! it is his child. These possessions are thine. Take them. Take my daughter. Her love will compensate for her father's hate. He joins their hands, and turning up the whites of his eyes (which elicits from the gallery cries of 'Bravo, Turk!') and saying, 'I die hap-pappy!' proceeds to do so in the most approved corkscrew style. Thus ended The Knight of the Sable Plume, by far the most incomprehensible piece of romance it had been my good fortune to witness. Mr. Horace Saint Herbert Fitzherbert was called before the curtain at the end of the drama, and appeared; there were calls also for Turk, but he did not appear. He gloomily informed me, when the performance was over, that Fitzherbert was on a 'starring' engagement, and that it was in the agreement that in his own pieces nobody should be allowed to appear before the curtain but himself. On reference to the playbill, I found that in The Lonely Murder at the Wayside Inn Turk was the murderer, and I am afraid to say how many times he deserved to be hanged for the dreadful crimes he performed in The Trials and Vicissitudes of a Servant-Girl. In the last piece the allegorical tableau in coloured fires may have conveyed a good moral, but the smell was suggestive of the lower regions, where good morals are not fashionable.

Following out the instructions given to me by Turk, I made my way, when the curtain fell for the last time, to the dressing-room at the back of the stage, and whispered my praises of my friend's acting. Before we went home, he and a number of his professional brethren 'looked in' at a neighbouring bar, where pewter pots were freely handed about. There was no lack of animated conversation, and the subject of course was the drama. One man, who had played a small character in The Knight of the Sable Plume, and played it well, was holding forth to two or three unprofessional friends on the peculiar hardship of his case. As he had not played in the last piece, I inferred from his condition that he had been regaling himself at the bar for some time before we entered. He was an elderly man, and Turk whispered to me that he had once been leading man in the theatre, but that he had come down in the world. Those who addressed him by name called him Mac.

'Ah, Turk, my boy,' he said, giving Turk a left-handed grasp; his right hand held his glass of whisky-toddy--'ah, my sons, come in to drink? That's right. Drown dull care.'

'You've tried to do that for a pretty considerable time, Mac,' said Turk good-humouredly. 'Take a pull at the pewter, Chris.'

'I have, my boy, I have,' returned Mac; I'm an old stager now, but, dammee! there's life in the old boy yet. I'll play Claude Melnotte with the youngest of you. I'm ready to commence all over again. Show me a more juvenile man than I am on the boards, and dammee! I'll stand glasses round I will--and pay for them if I can borrow the money!'

A volley of laughter greeted this sally, in which Mac joined most heartily.

'Drown dull care!' he continued. 'I've tried to do it for a pretty considerable time, as Turk says--dammee, my sons! I've it all my life, and I'd advise you to do the same. Care killed a cat, so beware. Before you came in, my sons, I was speaking to these gentlemen'--indicating his unprofessional friends--'who kindly asked me to take a glass with them--thank you, I don't mind; my glass is empty; another whisky-toddy--The cry is still they come! eh, my sons?--I was speaking to these gentlemen, whose names I have not the pleasure of knowing, but who take an interest in the profession. I was speaking to them of myself, in connection with the noble art. I was saying that I act for my bread----'

'And sack,' interrupted a member of the company. 'And sack. Mac.'

'Hang it, no, my son!' exclaimed the old actor, with a capital mixture of humour and dignity. 'I act for my bread; I let my friends pay for the sack. I may, or I may not, be an ornament to my profession; that is a matter of public opinion and public taste; but whether I am or am not, I am not ashamed to say I act for my bread. I was speaking to these gentlemen also--your healths, gentlemen--of the decadence of the drama. In the halcyon days of youth, in the days of the great Kemble (I made him my model; I trust I do not tarnish his fair fame), the drama was worth something. But now, when a fellow like this Fitzherbert--a man who has been pitchforked, so to speak, into the profession--comes in and takes all the fat of the piece, and when he is puffed and posted and advertised into a successful engagement, and when every other worthy member of the company is pushed into a corner, and compelled, so to speak, to hold a variety of lighted candies to show off his spurious brightness, it's an infernal hard thing to each of us as individuals, and a degradation to the drama as an art.'