AT the Obelisk streets radiate, and the trams going to London have to make their choice. The theatre in the road that leads to Blackfriars Bridge is a theatre of middle age, with its own opinion of the many juvenile competitors that have sprung up during recent years in near and in distant suburbs: it endeavours to preserve the semblance of youth and modernity by putting on four white globes of electric light, but its age is betrayed by a dozen women with aprons full of oranges, “Two a punny, a punny for two” (oranges are not eaten in the new theatres), and a tray on high trestles loaded with pigs’ trotters, which no one ever buys. Some steps go up to the shilling and the sixpenny seats; early doors, which exact from the over-anxious an additional threepence, are in a dark alley at the side, at the end of which is a door that leads to the box-office by day and the stage entrance by night. The outside of the house has coloured posters of grisly scenes that make the passer-by chill with fear: a yellow woman hurled down a blue precipice; the same lady bound by cords to a grandfather’s clock, which shows the hour as three minutes to twelve, and facing her two crape masked men with pistols; underneath the horrid words, “At midnight, my lady, you die.” A pleasanter note in the frames of photographs that hang slightly askew. Here, Mr. Lawrence Railton as a wicked Italian (at any rate, his moustache turns upwards, as Gratiano in a third-hand costume of the Louis the Fifteenth period, as Inspector Beagle in “Tracking the Criminal,” and in as many more characters as the frame will carry). In the centre, Mr. Lawrence Railton as the art of the photographer would have him be in real life, evening dress, insufficient chin, contemptuous smile—the portrait which occupied the position of honour on Rosalind’s mantelpiece.