They are soldier-like in everything they do. You may dress them up in what you choose, and call them what you will, but they will never be anything else but soldiers. On one occasion, our manager tried them as a rabble. They were carefully instructed how to behave. They were told how to rush wildly on with a fierce, tumultuous yell; how to crowd together at the back of the stage, and, standing there, surging backward and forward like an angry sea, brandish their weapons, and scowl menacingly upon the opposing myrmidons of the law, until, at length, their sullen murmurs deepening into a roar of savage hate, they would break upon the wall of steel before them, and sweep it from their path, as pent-up waters, bursting their bonds, bear down some puny barrier. That was the theory of the thing. That is how a stage mob _ought_ to behave itself. How it really does behave itself is pretty generally known. It comes in with a jog-trot, every member of it prodding the man in front of him in the small of his back. It spreads itself out in a line across the stage, and grins. When the signal is given for the rush, each man--still grinning--walks up to the soldier nearest to him, and lays hold of that warrior’s gun. The two men then proceed to heave the murderous weapon slowly up and down, as if it were a pump handle. This they continue to do with steady perseverance, until the soldier, apparently from a fit of apoplexy--for there is no outward and visible cause whatever to account for it--suddenly collapses, when the conquering rioter takes the gun away from him, and entangles himself in it. This is funny enough, but our soldiers made it funnier still. One might just as well have tried to get a modern House of Commons to represent a disorderly rabble. They simply couldn’t do it. They went on in single file at the double quick, formed themselves into a hollow square in the center of the stage, and then gave three distinct cheers, taking time from the sergeant. That was their notion of a rabble. The other set, the regular bob (sometimes eighteenpence) a night “sups,” were of a very different character. Professional supers, taken as a class, are the most utterly dismal specimens of humanity to be met with in this world. Compared with them, “sandwich-men” are dashing and rollicky. Ours were no exception to the rule. They hung about in a little group by themselves, and looked like a picture of dejected dinginess, that their mere presence had a depressing effect upon everybody else. Strange that men can’t be gay and light-hearted on an income of six shillings a week, but so it is. One of them I must exclude from this description--a certain harmless idiot, who went by the title of “Mad Mat,” though he himself always gave his name as “Mr. Matthew Alexander St. George Clement.”