"Unless Doctor Urquhart objects. But I dare say we can find a house where the performance trenches on none of the ten commandments, about which, I am aware, he is rather particular." "Oh," cried Tom, "'Thou shalt not steal,' from the French; and 'Thou shalt do no murder' on the Queen's English, are the only commandments indispensable on the stage. Come away, father." "You're a sad dog," said the father, shaking his fist at him, with a delighted grin, which reminded me of hornpipe-days. But the sad dog knew where to find the best bones to pick, and by no means dry, either. Now, though I am not a book-man, I love my Shakspere well enough not to like him acted--his grand old flesh and blood digged up and served out to this modern taste as a painted, powdered, dressed-up skeleton. But this night I saw him "in his habit as he lived," presented "in very form and fashion of the time." There was a good deal of show, certainly, it being a pageant play; but you felt show was natural; that just in such a way the bells must have rung, and the people shouted, for the living Bolingbroke. The acting, too, was natural; and to me, a plain man, accustomed to hold women sacred, and to believe that a woman's arms should be kept solely for the man who loves her, I own it was a satisfaction when the stage _Queen_ clung to the stage _King Richard_, in that pitiful parting, where,--= ````"Bad men, ye violate ```A twofold marriage--'twixt my crown and me, ```And then between me and my married wife,"= it was a satisfaction, I say, to know that it was her own husband the actress was kissing. This play, which Tom and the colonel voted "slow," gave me two hours of the keenest, most utterly oblivious, enjoyment; a desideratum not easily attainable. Mr. Charteris considered it fine in its way; but, after all, there was nothing like the opera. "Oh, Charteris is opera-mad," said Tom. "Every subscription-night, there he is, wedged in the crowd at the horrid little passage leading out of the Haymarket--among a knot of his cronies, who don't mind making martyrs of themselves for a bit of tootle-te-tooing, a kick-up, and a twirl. Well, I'm not fond of music." "I am," said Mr. Charteris, drily. "And of looking at pretty women, too, eh, my dear fellow?" "Certainly." And here he diverged to a passing criticism on the pretty women in the boxes round us: who were not few. I observed them, also--for I notice women's faces more than I was wont--but none were satisfactory, even to the eye. They all seemed over-conscious of themselves and their looks, except one small creature, in curls, and a red mantle--about the age of the poor wounded Russ, who might have been my own little adopted girl by this time, if she had not died. I wish, sometimes, she had not died. My life would have been less lonely, could I have adopted that child.