Then I paused. Without, the day was dull. Inside, to my unaccustomed eyes, all at first was darkness. I have not forgotten the anguish with which I began to realise some of the details of my surroundings. It was all so dreadful--so different to anything I had expected. To begin with, there was the smell. As the merest dot I never could stand odours of any kind. Even now, whoever presents me with a bottle of scent makes of me an enemy. That smelt as if all the bad air was kept in and all the good kept out. Then it was so small; to me it perhaps appeared smaller than it actually was, because I thought that Miss Pritchard's pupils would have filled it. And dirty, untidy, comfortless, beyond my powers of description. There was nothing on the ground to protect one's feet from the oozing damp. If the audience sat at all I could not think. I saw nothing in the way of seats, unless they were represented by some boards which were piled upon each other at one side. At one end, raised a little from the ground, was a platform of rough planks, so small that there could hardly have been room on it for half a dozen persons standing abreast. It never occurred to me till afterwards that that was the stage. I kept wondering where the stage was. I knew that theatres had stages. While, as they became used to the light, my keen young eyes were taking these things in, I perceived that the place had occupants. There were four men and three women. I should have put them down as the seven I had heard alluded to, had there not also been a litter of children. It was only the children who seemed to take any interest in me. They clustered round, a ragamuffin crowd, regarding me as if I were some strange beast. At last one of them exclaimed,-- "Mother, here's a little girl!" The woman whom, I supposed, the child addressed, looked up from some potatoes which she was washing in a pail of water. "Well, little girl, what is it you're wanting?" The place, the people, their surroundings, everything was so altogether different to the vague something I had anticipated, that, like the creature of moods I was, I seemed, all at once, to have passed from a world of fact into a world of dream. It was like one in a dream I answered,-- "I have come to be the Infant Roscius." Not unnaturally the lady who was washing the potatoes failed to understand. "What's that?" she demanded. I repeated my assertion. "I have come to be the Infant Roscius." Other of the grown-ups roused themselves to stare at me. "What's she talking about?" inquired a second woman, who had a baby at her breast. An elderly man, who was perched on the edge of the platform smoking a pipe, hazarded an explanation. "She's after tickets; that's what it is she wants." The potato washer seemed to be brightened by the hint. "Has your mother sent you to buy some tickets?" I shook my head solemnly. "I have come to act." "To--what?"