Returning to London, Ellen Terry, whose name seems already to have been fairly well established, had a part at the Royalty Theatre in a dreadful play founded on Sue’s _Atar-Gull_. It was her rôle in this gruesome drama to appear on the stage wrapped in the coils of a huge serpent, and shrieking the terror appropriate to the situation. This was at least an opportunity for one kind of acting and Miss Terry made the most of it. The contemporary accounts show that she shrieked most startlingly and whole-heartedly. Kate Terry had joined the stock company at Bristol, and there Ellen, when she was fourteen, went also. For a year she had the sound training--the best an actor can have--of acting many widely varying parts. “If I had to describe her acting in those days,” wrote a member of the company, “I should say its chief characteristic was a vivacious sauciness. Her voice already had some of the rich sympathetic quality which has since been one of her most distinctive charms. Although only in the first flush of a joyous girlhood, she was yet familiar enough with the stage to be absolutely at home on it.... We, the young fellows of that day, thought she was perfection; we toasted her in our necessarily frugal measures; we would gladly have been her hewers of wood and drawers of water. She had personal charm as well as histrionic skill. Her smiles were very sweet, but, alack for all of us, they were mathematically impartial.” During this stay in the west of England (the Bristol company appeared also at Bath) she acted a wide range of parts, from Shakespeare to extravaganza. The training, in quantity and variety, which was afforded by the stock companies of the middle of the last century, cannot easily be matched to-day. The theatrical system of England and America has been revolutionized, and the long run, the country-wide tour, the specialized actor, have become the rule. Only within the last few years, as in the rise of the Irish national theatre, the Manchester Players, and the upward trend in certain American stock companies, can we see something of a return to earlier conditions. There followed a year in London, in the company, headed by the older Sothern, which was playing at the Haymarket. She was but fifteen, yet the _Times_ said: “She is now matured into one of the happiest specimens of what the French call the _ingénue_.” She played Gertrude in _The Little Treasure_, Hero in _Much Ado about Nothing_, Lady Touchwood in _The Belle’s Stratagem_, Julia in _The Rivals_, and also Mary Meredith in a revival of _Our American Cousin_, in which Sothern was his famous other self, Lord Dundreary;--not bad for fifteen!