At the top of the stairs stands a tall man in a reddish beard. He is in evening-dress, but wears no decoration of any kind. Yet he is there to receive this distinguished throng. There is a gracious bow to each as he passes, and to some an extended hand and a sedate greeting given in a rich Dublin brogue. For the gentleman in the red beard is Mr Bram Stoker, the business man, chief bottle-holder and Boswell, of the Lyceum manager. Bram is one of your genuine hero-worshippers. He abandoned a big berth under the Dublin Corporation to follow the fortunes of the Chief. He makes much of his hero’s friends on the Press, and does his best to conciliate his detractors. He manages Irving’s finances—as far as the manager will permit their supervision. And he writes the Chief’s after-dinner speeches and his lectures on Shakespeare and the musical glasses. As he smiles on us now, he little foresees what the future holds for Irving and himself. No gloomy anticipations intrude as we pass the well-pleased priest of the vestibule. The Irving regime is for all time, and the “wing of friendship shall never moult a feather.” Alas for the futility of human foresight! Poor Bram has himself now gone to solve the great mystery. At last we have reached our stalls—you and I—and have time to look about us. The attendant acolyte has provided us with programmes. There is a subdued air of expectancy abroad. Conversation is carried on in decorous accents. There is no laughter. Even the deep bass of Jo Knight is tempered to the occasion. The orchestra files in. Mr. Hamilton Clarke takes his place above the tuneful choir. The popular parts of the house are crammed. The seasoned playgoers who have fought their way through the “Cowshed” to the front row of the pit point out to each other the eminent persons as they proceed to their stalls. They are not always infallible in their identification—these quidnuncs of the pit. Mr. Moy Thomas is confidently pointed out as Sir Garnet Wolseley. “Looks diff’rent in his uniform, don’t he?” observes the lady recipient of the information. I have heard them point out Lennox Browne as the Duke of Argyll, Sir Francis Jeune as Lord Leighton, and Mr. Hume Williams as Mr. Walter of Printing-House Square—a gentleman rarely seen at these functions, and one whose name, one would imagine, would hardly be known to the public of the pit. These illuminating asides were always delivered with the utmost confidence. And upon one such occasion I was overjoyed to hear myself identified and accepted as Cardinal Manning—an ecclesiastic to whom the theatre was anathema, whose priests were forbidden the playhouse, although, strangely enough, they were left free to patronize the music-halls.