Letizia left to the guardianship of the landlady while Bram and Nancy set out arm-in-arm to the theatre. Every night except Sunday the swing of a dingy door and the immemorial smell of the theatre within. Our modern young actors and actresses do not know that smell. It vanished in its perfection when electric light took the place of gas, and unretentive encaustic tiles lined the corridors instead of bare stone or whitewashed bricks. It requires something more than the warmth of hot-water pipes to ripen and conserve that smell. It may have lost some of its quintessential peculiarity when gas supplemented candles; but those gas-jets covered with wire guards, on which the ladies and gentlemen of visiting companies were requested by the management not to boil kettles, must have added a beautiful richness of their own. Thou glorious ancient smell of the theatre, thou sublime pot-pourri of grease-paint, wig-paste, vaseline, powder, perspiration, old clothes, oranges, tobacco, gas, drains, hair, whitewash, hot metal, and dusty canvas, where mayest thou still be savoured instead of that dull odour of Condy’s fluid and fire extinguishers which faintly repels us as we pass through the stage-doors of our contemporary palaces of amusement? * * * * * Our particular vagabonds found it easier to obtain joint engagements in musical shows. Nancy’s contralto voice, untrained though it was, grew better and better each year, and Bram had developed into a capital comedian. In the third and fourth winters after they were married they played together in pantomime, and for the Christmas season of 1894 they were engaged at the Theatre Royal, Greenwich—Bram as Idle Jack in _Dick Whittington_ and Clown in the Harlequinade, Nancy as Fairy Queen and Columbine. It was a pity that by now the Harlequinade was already a moribund form of entertainment, for Bram had a genuine talent for getting that fantastic street-life over the footlights. One may be allowed a fleeting suspicion that the English stage has lost more than it has gained by its banishment of the clown from its boards. The French, who are dramatically so much superior, have preserved their clowns.