There is also another objection to halls from the lecturer's standpoint, and that is the accessibility of the platform. Usually there are two sets of steps, which the audience consider have been constructed in order that they may come on the platform in a body and shake hands with the lecturer. If a lecturer be a human being, he is always glad to see two or three of his fellow-creatures, especially if they say something encouraging, but just because he is a human being and has spoken for an hour and a half, he is apt to lose heart when he sees half of his large audience, say seven hundred people, processing in his direction. It is on such an occasion that he is full of gratitude to a manager who will come in with his travelling coat and march the lecturer out at the back door, as a man in haste to catch his train or on any other pretence. A lecturer may count himself fortunate, and need have no anxiety about circumstances, who speaks from the stage of a theatre, because he will have his whole audience within convenient compass, and focussed upon him, and although he comes down to a whisper he will still be heard. When you lecture at a theatre you are known as the “star,” and as you cross the dark and mysterious under-world behind the stage you hear some one crying: “This way to the star's room,” which generally turns out to be the room of the leading actress, where you may spend a quarter of an hour in seeing yourself in the innumerable mirrors, and examining the long array of toilet instruments on the table. Theatrical people are most sympathetic and good-natured, and although they may not have the faintest idea who you are or what you are going to do, they always wish you well, and congratulate you if there is a good house. Their own house may not have been good last night, but they are glad if yours is good to-day. The crowning advantage of a theatre to a nervous and hard-wrought lecturer is its seclusion. You get in and out by the stage door, and there is not one person in a hundred of your audience could find that door, and if he did he would not get admittance. From the floor to the stage there is no way, and when you pass behind the curtain you are beyond reach even of an interviewer. When I become an impresario I shall never allow my “star” to be seen, except on the platform, and after he has done his work I will remove him swiftly in a closed conveyance. In this way I shall lay him under a debt of gratitude, and keep him in good humour, and get out of him a third more work. As I have no idea of entering on this business at present, I offer the hint to all impresarios everywhere, with my respectful compliments.