“Have a drink, old man,” somebody called after him. But Mr. Worsley suspected a _quid pro quo_ and shouted back: “Haven’t time now, old man. I’ll join you after the evening show. I’ve got to see the property man.” And they heard his voice go shouting along the corridors. “Props! Props! Where the deuce is Props?” “Poor old Mangel Worsley,” said the Demon King, with a gloomy shake of the head. “He never ought to have gone in for panto. He’s not up to it. He’d have done better to stick to Shakespeare. I saw his production of _Macbeth_ for Wilson Forbes. Very pretty little show it was, too. Very pretty. But this sort of thing is too big for him altogether. He can’t grasp the detail. Result? My entrances go for nothing. For absolutely nothing! It stands to reason, if a red spot-light’s thrown Right Centre when I come on Down Stage Left it kills me dead. But that doesn’t trouble Worsley, because he doesn’t realise the importance of ensemble. He niggles, and it’s a pity, because within limits he’s quite a good stage-manager.” How full the Theatre Royal was that Boxing Night! And Morton’s Theatre, the rival house, was just as full. People went to the pantomime even in days as near to us as the early nineties. They could not amuse themselves then by sporting with Amaryllis in the shade of a picture-palace while black-eyed heroes dreamed in profile during two hours of a monotonous reel or black-lipped heroines smeared their cheeks with vaseline and, intolerably magnified, blubbered silently at an unresponsive audience. The audience of the Theatre Royal that night was there to enjoy the performance, even though it lasted from seven o’clock till midnight. People went to the theatre in those days to see and to hear, to love and to hate. They were not sitting jam-packed in that reek of oranges and dust for the sake of cuddling one another. Nobody dressed up like a fireman came and squirted antiseptic perfumes over them. The odor of its own wedged-in humanity was grateful, an entity that breathed, cheered, laughed, and wept as one. The Grand, Islington, the Britannia, Hoxton, the Standard, Shoreditch, the transpontine Surrey, yes, and in those days Old Drury itself still defiant of change—all these theatres held people, not fidgety shadows gazing with lack-lustre eyes at a representation of fidgety shadows.