knew nothing on earth about me; saw me for the first time under conditions not perhaps exactly favourable to an impartial judgment; and afterwards, as I have before told, paid me occasional flying visits, which he spent chiefly in nodding and winking at me in a knowing manner, and treating the few words which fell from me as so many excellent jokes. He had heard that I was theatrically given, and humoured my shattered intelligence by taking every opportunity of telling me that he had once taken his daughters to the Adelphi to see 'Martin Chuzzlewit' or 'Nicholas Nickleby'--I forget which--followed invariably by a little anecdote of one Grossmith, an old 'entertainer,' who was wont to imitate Charles Mathews (whose loss we are regretting now) so well that when Mathews once met him in the train and heard him talk he said, 'If you are not Mathews, you must be Grossmith.' I think that was the story; but I grew rather addled over it at last, and am not quite sure. Grossmith the younger, who has since that time made for himself some name upon the stage, came twice from London to 'entertain' us. An old stage-lander, I seldom remember feeling so severely critical. 'Hyperæsthesia,' I think, is the medical alias for the quickening of the nervous perceptions which so curiously accompanies, and yet contrasts with, the odd sense of unreality with which bloodlessness of brain invests everything. I listened to the performer's humours like a man in a dream, with a bitter sense of unconscious revolt as I recalled many happy evenings at the play, and went drearily to bed, wondering more than usual how it was all to end. By an odd flicker of the old flame, I remember feeling as if it were incumbent upon me to go 'behind the scenes' and present myself, but could not make up my mind to it. What would the actor have thought had he come behind the scenes with me that night, I wonder! Some months afterwards I was watching him from a stage-box through the oddities of the 'Sorcerer,' and it brought back to me with a shock the fearful place where I had seen him last, and made me throw an involuntary look round me to see if any warder was on the watch. The feelings of fear and shame--for it has in one's own despite a sort of shame about it--that the experience left behind, died slow and hard. And a chance association like this would curiously awake them.