Other “props” were, a throne, gorgeous in gilt paper and glazed calico; a fire-grate, stuffed with red tinfoil; a mirror, made with silver paper; a bunch of jailer’s keys; handcuffs; leg irons; flat irons; rifles; brooms; bayonets; picks and crowbars for the virtuously infuriated populace; clay pipes; daggers made of wood; stage broadswords--there is no need to describe these, everybody knows them, they are like nothing else on earth; battle axes; candlesticks; a pound or two of short dips; a crown, set with diamonds and rubies each as big as a duck’s egg; a cradle--empty, an affecting sight; carpets, kettles, and pots; a stretcher; a chariot; a bunch of carrots; a costermonger’s barrow; banners; a leg of mutton, and a baby. Everything, in short, that could possibly be wanted, either in a palace or a garret, a farmyard or a battle-field. Still wandering about, I came across a hole in the floor at the side of the stage, and groped my way down a ladder to the region beneath, where the fairies come from, and the demons go to. It was perfectly dark, and I could see nothing. It smelt very moldy, and seemed to be full of cunning contrivances for barking your shins. After bumping myself about a good deal there, I was glad to find my way out again, deferring all further investigations to some future period, with a candle. On emerging, I saw that the company had at last begun to arrive. A tall, solemn-looking man was pacing the stage, and him I greeted. He was the stage manager, and so of course rather surly. I don’t know why stage managers are always surly, but they are. In the course of the next few minutes, there trotted in a demure-looking little man, who turned out to be our “first low comedy,” and very good low comedy he was, too, though, from his wooden expression, you might have thought him as destitute of humor as the librettist of a comic opera. Then followed the heavy man, talking in a very gruff voice to a good-looking young fellow with him, who played the juveniles when our manager didn’t take them himself. Then, after a short interval, a lady--an old queer-looking little lady, who walked with a stick, and complained of rheumatism, and who, as soon as she reached the stage, plumped herself down on the thick end of a mossy bank, from which nothing would induce her to rise until she got up to go home. She was our “old woman.” She did the doting mothers and the comic old maids. She had played everything in her time, and could play anything still. She would have taken Juliet, or Juliet’s nurse, whichever you liked, and have done both of them well. She would have been ten minutes making up for Juliet, and then, sitting in the middle of the pit, you would have put her down for twenty.