“I might have guessed what sort of a company it was by his sending me the parts he did. I play Duncan, Banquo, Seyton, and a murderer in _Macbeth_; Tybalt and the Apothecary in _Romeo and Juliet_; and Laertes, Osric, and the Second Player in _Hamlet_--and so on all through. None of us play less than two parts in the same piece. No sooner are we killed or otherwise disposed of as one person, than we are up again as somebody else, and that, almost before we have time to change our clothes. I sometimes have to come on as an entirely new party with no other change than the addition of a beard. It puts me in mind of the nigger who borrowed his master’s hat with the idea of passing himself off as ‘one of them white folks.’ I should think that if the audience--when there are any--attempt to understand the play, they must have a lively time of it; and if they are at all acquainted with our National Bard, they must be still more puzzled. We have improved so on the originals, that the old gentleman himself would never recognize them. They are one-third Shakespeare, and two-thirds the Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane. “Of course, I have not had my railway fare, which I was promised after joining, and I’ve given up asking for it now. “I got a chance of changing my quarters after a few weeks, and I need scarcely say I jumped at it. We passed through a big town that was the headquarters of an established circuit company, and, hearing that one of their ‘responsibles’ had just left, I went straight to the manager, offered myself, and was accepted. Of course, in the usual way, I ought to have given a fortnight’s notice to the other manager, but, under the circumstances, this could hardly have been insisted upon. So I made the Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane a present of all the arrears of salary he owed me--at which generosity on my part we both grinned--and left him at once. I don’t think he was very sorry. It saved him a few shillings weekly, for my place was filled by one of the orchestra, that body being thereby reduced to two.” The company of which I was now a member was one of the very few stock companies then remaining in the provinces. The touring system had fairly set in by this time, and had, as a consequence, driven out the old theatrical troupes that used to act on from year to year within the same narrow circle, and were looked upon as one of the institutions of the half-dozen towns they visited.