I had exactly ten years more with Henry Irving after "Henry VIII." During that time we did "King Lear," "Becket," "King Arthur," "Cymbeline," "Madame Sans-Gene," "Peter the Great," and "The Medicine Man," I feel too near to these productions to write about them. But a time will come. The first night of "Cymbeline" I felt almost dead. Nothing seemed right. "Everything is so slow, so slow," I wrote in my diary. "I don't feel a bit inspired, only dull and hide-bound." Yet Imogen was, I think, the _only_ inspired performance of these later years. On the first night of "Sans-Gene" I acted _courageously_ and fairly well. Everyone seemed to be delighted. The old Duke of Cambridge patted, or rather, _thumped_ me on the shoulder and said kindly: "Ah, my dear, _you_ can act!" Henry quite effaced me in his wonderful sketch of Napoleon. "It seems to me some nights," I wrote in my diary at the time, "as if I were watching Napoleon trying to imitate H. I., and I find myself immensely interested and amused in the watching." "The Medicine Man" was, in my opinion, our only _quite_ unworthy production and I wrote in my diary: "If 'Manfred' and a few such plays are to succeed this, I simply must do something else." But I did not! I stayed on, as everyone knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise of Henry's was no more, when the farcical Lyceum Syndicate took over the theatre. I played a wretched part in "Robespierre," and refused L12,000 to go to America with Henry in "Dante." In these days Henry Irving was a changed man. He gave the whole thing up--as a producer, I mean. As an actor he worked as faithfully as ever. Henley's stoical lines might have been written of him as he was in those last days: Out of the night that covers me Black as the pit from pole to pole I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbow'd. Henry Irving did not treat me badly. I did not treat him badly. He revived "Faust" and produced "Dante." I would have liked to stay with him to the end of the chapter, but I could not act in either of these plays. But we never quarrelled. Our long partnership dissolved naturally. It was all very sad, but it could not be helped. THE LOST MOTHER BY BLANCHE M. KELLY DECORATIONS BY LESTER RALPH ... among the rocks one of the sea women combing her long hair, and if he can creep up to her unbeknownst, and steal away from her her "cubuleen driuth," which is a kind of small cap the merrows do be wearing, she can never go back under the sea any more at all, but must follow his bidding while ever he has it in his keeping.