Mr. Fred Leslie (a name to conjure with!) was almost fiercely emphatic in the part of Paillard, and I preferred the relatively quiet methods of Mr. Austin Melford, who did without italics. Mr. Ralph Roberts was droll as a waiter; and it may have been my fault that I found Mr. Davy Burnaby rather unfunny in the part of Matthieu.
Of the ladies, two could sing and two, or even three, could act (Miss Lily St. John could do both); nearly all had good looks and a few of them were pleasantly acrobatic.
The scene of the Hotel Pimlico, with an alleged private sitting-room on one side, an alleged bedroom on the other, and a hall and staircase in the middle, was extraordinarily unconvincing. The partition walls came to an end at quite a long distance from the front; and, with the general company spreading themselves at large over the whole width of the foreground, it was very difficult to entertain any illusion of that privacy which is of the essence of the cabinet particulier. I say nothing of the bedroom, whose tenancy was frankly promiscuous.
The fun, of course, is old-fashioned; if one may say it of a French farce, it is Victorian. Apart from a few topical allusions worked in rather perfunctorily there is scarcely anything said or done that might not have been said or done in the 'eighties. But for a certain type of Englishman there is a perennial attraction in feeling that at any moment the proprieties may be outraged. That they never actually are outraged does not seem very greatly to affect his pleasure. He can always console himself with easy conjecture of the wickedness of the original. So there will never be wanting a public for these Noctes Parisianæ.
Let us hope that somehow it all helps to keep the sacred flame of the Entente burning. Vive Millerand!
O.S.
BETTERING THE BANYOROS.
(By a Student of Anthropology.)
Sir James Frazer's luminous résumé of the investigations of the Mackie Expedition amongst the Banyoros has only one defect. He omits all reference to the subsequent and even more fruitful visit of the Expedition to the adjoining Noxas tribe, whose manners and customs are of extraordinary interest. This remarkable race are noted not merely for their addiction to the dance, but for the kaleidoscopic rapidity with which the dances themselves are changed from season to season. Only a few years ago the entire tribe were under the spell of the Ognat, which in turn gave place to the Tortskof and the Zaj, the last named being an exercise in which violent contortions of the body were combined with the profoundest melancholy of facial expression. Curiously enough the musicians who are employed at these dances are not of indigenous stock, but of a negroid type and are imported from a distance at high salaries.