It was Staithley’s sporting hotel, and golf club-houses, not to mention the habit of golfers of motoring to their sport, have dispelled the illusion that sportsmen are a hardy race. The Wheatsheaf had its crowded hour when the visiting teams of professional footballers who came to oppose Staithley Rovers arrived in a charabanc, and attracted customers, who paid reckless prices for drinks in a place where they could get near views of authentic heroes: but for the most part, solid, quiet comfort was the keynote of the Wheatsheaf and commercial travelers knew it. Those of them who were not victims of the falling status of the traveler, and the too closely scrutinized expense accounts, went to the Wheatsheaf; the others envied them and went where they could afford to go. The uninstructed Londoner would have passed it by without a second glance; the Wheatsheaf did not advertise. It was innocent of gilt, and its whisky was unwatered. It was a very good hotel. Nevertheless, Mr. Alastair Montagu, who always stayed there when his company was at the Theater Royal, was surprised to see Lexley Chown in the smoking room of the Wheatsheaf. He remembered the eminent actor-manager, and his surprise was not that Chown, being in Staith-ley, should have the discrimination to stay at the Wheatsheaf, but that Chown should be in Staithley. Chown was a figure in the profession, but emphatically a London figure. The business of Mr. Chown was that of an “artiste’s agent.” A middleman trading in human flesh and blood? Perhaps; but Chown was a useful clearing-house. He was an impressive person, floridly handsome, beautifully dressed, and the routine work which kept him and the expensively rented, exquisitely furnished suite of offices near Leicester Square was something like this. A manager would ring up and say that by to-morrow he must have a snub-nosed actor, six feet tall, with red hair and a cockney accent to play a part worth seven pounds a week. Mr. Chown, or Mr. Chown’s secretary, consulted the card index and, by its means, collected half a dozen unemployed actors who answered, roughly, to the manager’s specification, and sent them to see the manager, who might choose one of them but more probably would not. He would probably ring up and say, “I say, Chown, I’ve looked over this bunch. Not one of them a bit like it.” Chown would reply, truthfully, that each of his applicants had a snub nose, red hair, was six feet high and a cockney who was prepared to act for seven pounds a week, and that these were the qualifications the manager had demanded. The manager would not deny it, but “I had a brain-wave last night. Billy Wren is the man I want for that part. He was born to play it, only,” pathetically, “I don’t know where he is.” “I do,” Mr. Chown would say calmly. “He’s in ‘The Poppy Plant,’ which is at Eastbourne this week and at Torquay next week.” “Get him out of that for me, old man.”