My last music hall was, I remember, on a Monday night,--I sailed on the Wednesday and spent the Tuesday night at home,--and it was a very special occasion--the benefit of Sam Adams, the manager of the Royal, in Holborn. I have since been in the Royal as it is to-day--it is called the Holborn Empire--and how changed! Two performances nightly, and not a single thing the same except its site. Sam had a red, impetuous face and curly hair, and a shirt front that, one felt, would cover the Oval. I asked Alf Pinto about him, and found that his name was not even known; but Trist tells me he is dead, and his own hall--the Trocadero, or Troc, as it was called by the bloods--has disappeared too, and is now a restaurant. Poor Sam! It is odd what flashes of insight one has. I remember thinking that night, in the midst of his triumph and all the jolly good-fellowship that sweltered round him, that he did not look as if marked out for happiness or longevity. I cannot remember much of the evening, but George Leybourne was there with two or three slap-up songs, and Lieutenant Cole the ventriloquist, and Sam Redfern, a burnt-cork cynic, and Henri Clark, a comic singer, and an extraordinary couple named Ryley and Marie Barnum, who called themselves (to the total exclusion of George Fox) "the Original Quakers," the adjective made necessary, I imagine, by too successful imitation of their discreet yet mischievous caperings. Trist tells me that of these entertainers Leybourne is dead (to think that death should come also to Champagne Charley!), Henri Clark owns a music-hall in the Edgware Road, and Sam Redfern was recently in the bankruptcy court through inability to make a chicken farm pay. Well, well! But if I can see no more of the performances of these variety stars, there are two or three actors still performing whom I saw that month during my farewell round of gaiety. Lionel Brough, who was then with Willie Edouin and Lydia Thompson in _Blue Beard_ at the Globe, is still playing, and Wyndham, who was in _Brighton_ at the Royal Court, is active almost as ever; but James Thorne, whom I laughed at in _Our Boys_ at the Vaudeville, Irving who was in _Hamlet_ at the Lyceum, Buckstone and Sothern in _Our American Cousin_ at the Haymarket--where are they?