When they are more than usually rollicking they stand in a semicircle, with their hands on each other's shoulders, and sway from side to side, trying to make themselves sick. But this is only when they are simply bursting with joy.
Stage peasants never have any work to do.
Sometimes we see them going to work, sometimes coming home from work, but nobody has ever seen them actually at work. They could not afford to work—it would spoil their clothes.
They are very sympathetic, are stage peasants. They never seem to have any affairs of their own to think about, but they make up for this by taking a three-hundred-horse-power interest in things in which they have no earthly concern.
What particularly rouses them is the heroine's love affairs. They could listen to them all day.
They yearn to hear what she said to him and to be told what he replied to her, and they repeat it to each other.
In our own love-sick days we often used to go and relate to various people all the touching conversations that took place between our lady-love and ourselves; but our friends never seemed to get excited over it. On the contrary, a casual observer might even have been led to the idea that they were bored by our recital. And they had trains to catch and men to meet before we had got a quarter through the job.
Ah, how often in those days have we yearned for the sympathy of a stage peasantry, who would have crowded round us, eager not to miss one word of the thrilling narrative, who would have rejoiced with us with an encouraging laugh, and have condoled with us with a grieved "Oh," and who would have gone off, when we had had enough of them, singing about it.
By the way, this is a very beautiful trait in the character of the stage peasantry, their prompt and unquestioning compliance with the slightest wish of any of the principals.
"Leave me, friends," says the heroine, beginning to make preparations for weeping, and before she can turn round they are clean gone—one lot to the right, evidently making for the back entrance of the public-house, and the other half to the left, where they visibly hide themselves behind the pump and wait till somebody else wants them.