Irving has often told me that in playing the double part the real difficulty was not to make the two men unlike and guilt look like guilt, but the opposite. He used to adduce instances told him by experienced judges and counsel of where they had been themselves deceived by demeanour. It is indeed difficult for any one to discriminate between the shame, together with the submission to the Divine Law to which he has been bred, of the innocent, and the fear, whose expression is modified by hardihood, of the guilty. In Irving’s case the points of difference were not merely overt; there were subtle differences of tone and look and bearing—loftiness, for instance, as against supreme and fearless indifference and brutality. _The Lyons Mail_ was always one of the most anxious and exhausting of his plays. In the first place he was always on the stage, either in the one character of Lesurques or the other of Dubose—except at the end of the play, where he appeared to be both. All the intervals were taken up with necessary changes of dress. In the next place the _time_ is all-important. In any melodrama accuracy as to time is important to success; but in this one of confused identity it is all-important. There are occasions when the delay of a single second will mar the best studied effect, and when to be a second too soon is to spoil the plot. In certain plays the actors must “overlap” in their speeches; the effect of their work must be to carry the thought of the audience from point to point without wavering. Thus they receive the necessary information without the opportunity of examining it too closely. This is a part of the high art of the stage. There can be illusions by other means than light. Once there was a peculiar _contretemps_ in the acting. Tom Mead was a fine old actor with a tall thin form and a deep voice that sounded like an organ. His part was that of Jerome Lesurques, the father of the unhappy man whose double was the villain Dubose. He had played it for many years and very effectively. The end of the first act comes when Dubose, the robber and murderer, is confronted by Jerome Lesurques. The old man thinks it is his son whom he sees rifling the body of the mail guard. As he speaks the words: “Good God! my son, my son,” Dubose fires at him, wounding him on the arm, and escapes as the curtain comes down. On this particular night—it was one of the last nights in New York, closing the tour of 1893–4—Mead forgot his words. Dubose stood ready with his pistol to fire; but no words came. Now, if the audience do not know that Jerome Lesurques thinks that his son is guilty the heart is taken out of the play, for it is his unconscious evidence that proves his son’s guilt. The words had to be spoken at any cost by _some one_. Irving waited, but the old man’s memory was gone. So he himself called out in a loud voice: “I’m not your son!” and shot him. And, strange to say, none of the audience seemed to notice the omission.