“It isn’t a joke at all, Nancy. It’s very serious. Your father won’t hear of letting us get married, he says we’re too young.” “The dear old duffer,” said Nancy. “Why, then we’ll just have to get married without saying any more about it.” “Never!” thundered the heavy father, springing to his feet. “Then I’ll go back to Aunt Kathleen,” Nancy vowed. “If I’m old enough to make love on the stage, I’m old enough to make love off it.” Michael O’Finn, having taken up this attitude in his lodgings, could not resist elaborating it before the performance in the cosy little saloon bar of the “Saracen’s Head” just round the corner from the stage-door. The result was that his delivery of Jacques’s great speech in the Forest of Arden lost much of its austere melancholy and most of its articles definite and indefinite. A pronounced thickening of all the sibilants with a quantity of unnecessary tears left Jacques himself, at the end of that strange eventful history, in a state of mere oblivion and apparently sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. When the curtain fell on the second act, Mrs. Hunter-Hart, who had been watching him from the wings, invited her heavy man to step up to her dressing-room and explain what he meant by it. “I am ecsheedingly dishtreshed, Mrs. Hart, but a domeshtic mishfortune overtook me thish afternoon and I’m afraid that I drank rather more than wash good for me in the ‘Sharashen’s Head.’” He proceeded to give Mrs. Hunter-Hart an account of the shock which had led him into such unprofessional conduct. “O’Finn, I’m astonished at you! I would not believe that a man of your age could make such an unmitigated ass of himself. Come, let me try you with your cues. “_Even a toy in hand here, sir: nay, pray be covered._” “_Will you be married, motley?_” O’Finn muttered thickly. “_As the ox hath his bow, sir_,” Mrs. Hart went on, “_the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so hath man his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling_.” “Yes, I perceive the point you’re making, ma’am,” the old actor admitted. “But with your permission I would....” “Beginners third act,” cried the junior member of the company, hurrying along the stone corridors past the dressing-room doors. Perhaps if the interval had been longer, Mrs. Hunter-Hart might have persuaded Michael O’Finn that he was behaving unreasonably and absurdly. As it was, he recovered his sense of outraged paternity, and on the following night he worked up his feelings in the bar of the “Saracen’s Head” to such a pitch that several members of the company began to think that Bram really must have been behaving rather badly with Nancy. O’Finn played Sir Toby Belch that night, and, as the _Birmingham Daily Post_ said, it was probably as ripe a performance as had ever been seen on any stage.