Here I was in the very noonday of my life, fresh from Lady Macbeth and still young enough to play Rosalind, suddenly called upon to play a rather uninteresting mother in "The Dead Heart." However, my son Teddy made his first appearance in it, and had such a big success that I soon forgot that for me the play was rather "small beer." It had been done before, of course, by Benjamin Webster and George Vining. Henry engaged Bancroft for the Abbe, a part of quite as much importance as his own. It was only a melodrama, but Henry could always invest a melodrama with life, beauty, interest, mystery, by his methods of production. "I'm full of French Revolution," he wrote to me when he was preparing the play for rehearsal, "and could pass an examination. In our play at the taking of the Bastille, we must have a starving crowd--hungry, eager, cadaverous faces. If that can be well carried out, the effect will be very terrible, and the contrast to the other crowd (the red and fat crowd--the blood-gorged ones who look as if they'd been all drinking wine--_red_ wine, as Dickens says) would be striking.... It's tiresome stuff to read, because it depends so much on situations. I have been touching the book up, though, and improved it here and there, I think. "A letter this morning from the illustrious ---- offering me his prompt book to look at.... I think I shall borrow the treasure, why not? Of course he will say that he has produced the play and all that sort of thing, but what does that matter, if one can only get one hint out of it? "The longer we live, the more we see that if we only do our own work thoroughly well, we can be independent of everything else or anything that may be said.... "I see in Landry a great deal of Manette--that same vacant gaze into years gone by when he crouched in his dungeon nursing his wrongs.... "I shall send you another book soon to put any of your alterations and additions in--I've added a lot of little things with a few lines for you--very good, I think, though I say it as shouldn't--I know you'll laugh! They are perhaps not startlingly original, but better than the original, anyhow! Here they are--last act! "'Ah, Robert, pity me. By the recollections of our youth, I implore you to save my boy! (_Now_ for 'em!) "'If my voice recalls a tone that ever fell sweetly upon your ear, have pity on me! If the past is not a blank, if you once loved, have pity on me!' (Bravo!) "Now I call that very good, and if the 'If' and the 'pity's' don't bring down the house, well it's a pity! I pity the pittites. "... I've just been copying out my part in an account book--a little more handy to put into one's pocket. It's really very short, but difficult to act, though, and so is yours. I like this 'piling up' sort of acting, and I am sure you will, when you play the part. It's restful. 'The Bells' is that sort of thing."