Now any one of a speculative tendency in London, or out of it, could have that day made a fortune by selling “bears”—and there is no lack of sportsmen willing to make money on a “sure thing.” And yet for three days at least there must have been in business circles some uneasiness of so pronounced a character that it for the time obliterated social life with many people. Had they knowledge where the public pulse lay, and how to time its beats, they might have plucked fortune from disaster. In the Lyceum we became wide awake to the situation. In a time of panic and disaster there is no need for mimetic tragedy; the real thing crowds it out. The very next day we arranged to change the bill on the earliest day possible. As we were booked for six weeks we arranged to change the tragic _Ravenswood_ for _Much Ado About Nothing_—the brightest and cheeriest comedy in our _répertoire_—on Monday, January 3. This we did with excellent result. From the day of the failure of Baring’s the receipts began to dwindle. The nightly return dropped from three hundred pounds odd to two hundred pounds odd, and finally to one hundred pounds odd. With the change to Comedy they jumped up again at once to the tune of an extra hundred pounds a performance. Except for some performances in the provinces in the autumn that was the last of _Ravenswood_. There was never a chance for its revival, though from that we might have expected much; it was burned in the fire at our storage in 1898—of which more anon. III _Nance Oldfield_, as Ellen Terry plays it, is the concentration of a five-act comedy into one act and one scene. It is a play that allows an adequate opportunity of the gifts of the great actress. For Ellen Terry’s gifts are of so wide a range that the mere variety of them is in itself a gift; and the congruity of them in such a play allows them to help each other and each to shine out all the stronger for the contrast.