"But Ellen Terry's charm, her delightful grace and innate refinement, quite disarmed the prudes, and Cupid triumphed in front of the curtain as well as behind it, and lightly shot his darts in all directions. Miss Hodson was at that time a deservedly great favourite, but the Terry sisters unconsciously became the founders of a new cult among local playgoers, and set up an empire of their own; in fact, I am hardly exaggerating if I say that there were among the gilded youth of Bristol two rival factions--the Hodson faction and the Terry faction, whose friendly antagonism was as keen, if not as fatal, as that of the Montagues and the Capulets. "If my memory serves me right, Ellen was the Dictys of the other burlesque, Miss Hodson and Miss Kate Terry playing the two _rôles_ of the title. In one of these pieces Arthur Wood had to speak a line in which occurs the phrase, "such a mystery here." He made much nightly capital--for these burlesques had long runs considering they were played by a stock company in a provincial theatre--by emphasising the syllables of 'mystery,' so as to make the sentence sound 'such a Miss Terry here.' "I was only a general utility actor in that company, and I had to play one of the crowd in 'Perseus and Andromeda,' whose duty it was to be suddenly turned to stone, after the fashion of Lot's wife--only with a more studied artistic pose--at the sight of Medusa's head. In order to give _vraisemblance_ to the illusion, we of the populace were costumed in a parti-coloured fashion, one half white, the other half of some strong colour, and our faces were made up on one side only with a sort of whitewash. When, at the given signal, we turned round our white sides with the precision of soldiers at drill to the full stream of the limelight, striking simultaneously more or less statuesque attitudes, the situation was, for those days, effective, and nightly brought down the house and evoked a call for the manager. I recollect that before the production, in order to ascertain the effect of the whitewash, one or two of us, true to our profession of 'general utility,' had to put it on at a midnight rehearsal, after we had resumed our ordinary dress. Many years have elapsed since the incident, yet I can still hear the peals of musical laughter with which Ellen Terry greeted our intensely comical appearance, and I can still see the mischief and good-natured ridicule sparkling in her merry eyes.