Knowing “Practical John,” I soon came to know the members of his company, the bright, particular star of which was Miss Nellie Farren. Miss Farren was the embodiment of the very spirit of burlesque. She was fun personified. And although she had the support always of a distinguished company—it included such men as Toole, Edward Terry, Royce, and John MacLean, and such women as Constance Loseby and Kate Vaughan—the whole weight of the production seemed to fall on Nellie Farren’s shoulders, and she lifted it how, and where, and when she pleased. Off the stage Miss Farren was quite as amusing as on. She had the rare gift of spontaneous humour, a fine flow of animal spirits, an unfailing good temper, the whole shot through with a certain indefinable Cockney quality which gave to everything she said its hall-mark. I do not think I ever spent more enjoyable afternoons than on those Sundays when Miss Farren was at home to her friends at Sunbury. She had bought two cottages near the gates of Kempton Park, and had them knocked into one. And here, on Sundays, the merry little _châtelaine_ received her friends. And some very jovial gatherings we had on those Sunbury sabbaths. The outstanding characteristic of the average actress when off the stage is an obvious artificiality. The charm of the Farren’s society was in her frank naturalness, her ingenuous honesty. Nellie Farren was the wife of Robert Soutar, the stage-manager of the Gaiety, a comic actor of limited range, and the author of some popular farces. An extremely convivial soul when off the stage, he was regarded as a martinet while on it, and during the entire period of his stage-management hardly a day passed without a rehearsal being called on some pretence or another. For this reason he was highly disapproved of by the chorus, toward the members of which his sentiments were sometimes conveyed with brutal directness. “It’s the only sort of language they understand,” he once said to me. Perhaps he was right, although the polished shafts of Byron’s irony often went home quite as surely. I have known a girl at rehearsal burst into tears under the suavely-spoken sarcasm of Byron, and I once received a letter of complaint from a member of a chorus illustrating one of his burlesques, in which the talented author of “Our Boys” was described as “a nasty, sneerin’ beest.” The inauguration of the old Gaiety and the passing of it, roughly speaking, cover the period of my own experience of the London stage and its interesting entourage, which must be my excuse for according to my memories of the Gaiety what may seem to be an undue space.