knotted branch of a tree which was his walking-stick from the moment when the idea of the murder came into his head! I could write pages about him. It is an impression quite ineffaceable. He got half boastful of that walking-staff to himself, and half afraid of it, and didn't know whether to be grimly pleased that it had the jagged end, or to hate it and be horrified at it. He sat at a little table in the inn-yard drinking with the traveler; and this horrible stick got between them like the Devil, while he counted on his fingers the uses he could put the money to." It will be a surprise to many readers to learn that Frederic Lemaitre is still living and still playing. On the evening of March 25, 1874, I went to this same old theatre of the Ambigu to see him play Feuillantin in _Le Portier du Numero 15_. The part is that of an old man, and the actor played it "in his habit as he lived," without artificial make-up or wig. His own long iron-gray hair floated on the air; the wrinkles in his old face were painted there by the hand of Time; his voice was cracked and broken, and his gait that of advanced age. I had formed the impression, beforehand, that Lemaitre was simply a tottering old wreck, a painful and pitiable sight; and I went to the theatre prepared to be saddened by the spectacle of a ruin. A ruin it was, perhaps, but what a grand and impressive one! The old man was magnificent! So far from exciting pity, he roused in me feelings of the warmest enthusiasm. So far from seeming to ask for sympathy, he compelled admiration by force of his splendid pantomime, in witnessing which one forgot he had no voice, or remembered it only to see in the fact a fitting feature of the old _portier_ he was playing. In the midst of my admiration for the actor, however, I studied the man himself; and I saw that he dominated his fellow-actors with a will of the most imperious sort. He swept along the action of the piece, and manipulated the rather poor company of actors who moved about him, with a leonine agility of movement and an autocratic command of the scene which showed that even in his old age he was no subject for patronizing sympathy. There was a meek, white-faced young lady who played the part of granddaughter to the old _portier_, and I transferred my pity to her; for the way Lemaitre hauled her hither and thither by her slender wrists (not in simulated rudeness, for she was the pet of the old _portier's_ heart, but simply in the actor's imperative arrangements of tableaux), and the manner in which he dragged her young head with his iron arms to his broad breast in affectionate but rough and picturesque embrace, were enough to wear on the nerves of the stoutest young woman; and this one was as frail in form as she was fair in face.