“I’ve seen my dear old manageress. She has consented to grace the festivity in person, and the acting-manager of the theatre has insisted on our using the green-room. The supper is being sent in from the ‘Blue Boar.’ Ham. Chicken. Lobster. All the appropriate delicacies. Several of the orchestra are coming. Very jolly fellows. We’ll have some capital fiddling. My dear old pal Charlie Warburton will give us Hood’s _Bridge of Sighs_, and I daresay we can persuade him into _Eugene Aram_ as well. I’ve asked Mrs. Hart to recite us one of her gems. In fact, the whole crowd will oblige. We are going to make a memorable night of it. You couldn’t have chosen a better time to get married. We’ve had a splendid Whitweek, and that showery Whit Monday put Mrs. H.-H. into such a delightful humour. The last day of the tour. By gad, girl, I’m proud to be your poor old father. And the booking to-night is splendid, I hear. We shall have a bumper house for _Twelfth Night_.” It was a merry evening in the old green-room of the Opera House, Leicester, now, alas! fallen from its companionable status and turned to some practical and business-like purpose. Gilded mirrors on the walls, glittering gasoliers, bright silver, and shining faces, warmth and happiness of careless human beings gathered together for a few hours in fellowship, all are vanished now. Files and dockets and roll-top desks have replaced them. There is no doubt that the central figure on that genial night was Michael O’Finn. The bride and bridegroom were teased and toasted, but the central figure was the erstwhile dejected father. How many speeches he made it would be hard to say, but he certainly made a very great many. He proposed everybody’s health in turn, and when everybody’s health had been proposed and drunk, he proposed corporate bodies like the theatre orchestra, the town council of Leicester, and Mrs. Hunter-Hart’s Shakespearian Company. And when he had exhausted the living he sought among the dead for his toasts, raising his glass to the memory of Will Shakespeare, Davy Garrick, Ned Kean, and Mrs. Siddons. When the mighty dead were sufficiently extolled he proposed abstractions like Art and the Drama. His final speech was made about four o’clock in the morning—to the memory of the happy days, old friends, and jolly companions.