actor is dressed in a fashionable walking-suit and has every appearance of prosperity. Again, the leading lady sits with complete indifference in a chair and swings her parasol and chats with her neighbor while one of the gentlemen opposite to her reads a declaration of love in a sing-song voice from a roll of paper in his hand. Another member of the company has the lines, "Here for centuries the Mordaunts have lived the simple and honorable lives of English country gentlemen; here they have been born; here they have died; and among them all not one of them has ever done aught mean or base. Here, in this grand old hall, a reputation has been built which the proudest of nobles might envy;" and should the spectator, following the wave of the actor's hand, look for the hall to which the speech refers, he would only discover the stage before him, with no scene set upon it, with the wings and the "flats" stacked up at the rear, the company gathered in the centre, and a few gas-jets paled by the rays of daylight issuing from a yellowish window. The heroine at another point, wandering, as the lines suppose, about the ample gardens of the Elizabethan house at twilight, bids her lover come and hear the soft echoes of the cuckoo, but it is only the knocking of the machinist's hammer and the voices of the property-man and the scene-painter, who are working in the "flies" high above the proscenium, that are audible, and not the whistle of a bird. The incongruity which amuses the stranger to the theatrical arcana is unnoticed by the actors, whose profession is made up of anomalies.