Clelia (Lieut. Smith), for example, of whom I, as Marco, was supposed to be enamoured, trusted to hide his identity--particularly as disclosed by his feet--in a few yards of chintz, rather unhappily of identical pattern with the stage curtain! A cardigan jacket, frilled and ruffled with an edging of white linen torn from a frayed pocket handkerchief, made a quite presentable doublet for me. Toulon, the French orderly’s _béret_, turned up at the corners, and bearing red plumes, held in place by a shining tin pipe-top, served as headgear. The lid of a boric ointment box suspended from my black lanyard formed a distinguished-looking decoration of merit; the tasselled cord of a dressing-gown made an admirable sword-belt. An Italian military mantle completed my costume. A mandolin--an instrument of torture to be dreaded above all others, but which musically was mute in the piece, and pictorially represented a guitar--was borrowed from an orderly. In passages where “A Venetian Vignette” did not awe the audience it at least amused it. Owing to an eleventh-hour timidity on the part of two of our Italians I had to touch the light guitar and raise my voice in apparent song, while off, Lieut. Calvi, with piano muted with newspapers, and Lieut. Lazarri, with distended larynx, supplied the actualities, and this with such success that the many new-comers among the audience, knowing neither Joseph nor Lazarri, were deceived, and I received a very ill-deserved ovation for Toselli’s “Serenade.” [Illustration: SCENE FROM “A VENETIAN VIGNETTE”] The Portuguese Captain Teixeira, who had wonderful imitative faculties, so that twice I have seen him hypnotize young birds to within a few inches of his hand, as a nightingale “off,” “trilled with all the passion of all the love songs that have been sung since the world began”--an interpolation made by the dramatist in his dialogue to permit of an effect so original! “Noises off” tolled the bell--the great kitchen poker--which was intended to warn the lovers of the fleet passage of the hour, just about five minutes behind time, making his thus tardy entry on the principle that nothing be lost. Lieut. H., who had taken part in bull-fighting in Southern America, gave me the _coup de grâce_ in his own fashion, between the shoulder blades, and, judging by the force, with a momentary forgetting of the fact that he was only in Southern Germany. With a “Mio Dio! Io sono morto!” for the sake of local colouring, I and the curtain fell almost simultaneously.