In spite of their fatigue the company played _Dick Whittington_ that night at Greenwich with treble the vigour of the afternoon performance. Everything went better, in spite of the absence of Mrs. Pottage and Letizia. Even the limelight men managed to keep their beams steadily fixed on the object of their enhancement whencesoever he might enter, whithersoever he might move, wheresoever he might stand. The billows of the Demon King’s bass rolled along twice as majestically. Nancy’s song with the overwashed chorister in the circle earned a double encore. Principal boy, principal girl, dame, knockabout comedians, all gained the good-will of the house. But _the_ success was Bram. After his first scene Idle Jack had only to appear on the stage to send the audience into a roar. The tritest line of dialogue was received as heavenly wit. The stalest piece of fooling was welcomed in a rapture. “Darling, you are being so funny to-night,” Nancy told him, when for a moment they found themselves side by side in the wings. “I don’t feel at all funny,” Bram said. “In fact, it’s because I’m feeling so tired and depressed off, I suppose, that I’m trying to cheer up by being extra funny on.” He squeezed her hand, and a moment later she heard the deep-voiced laughter of the house greeting another of his entrances. Bram’s success as Idle Jack that night was consolidated by his Joey. He was not just the traditional clown with wide red mouth, bending low in exaggerated laughter and treading always on hot bricks. There was something of the Pierrot in his performance. Not that he scorned tradition overmuch. The whole audience recognised him as the authentic Joey of their imagination; but he did contrive to be somehow the incarnate spirit of that London street much more essentially than the heavy-footed Harlequin, much more essentially than Columbine, whose short pink tarlatan skirt did not become Nancy’s height, though she pirouetted on and off the stage gracefully enough. Pantaloon, too, was good, and the actor did manage to represent that hoary-headed ancient Londoner in his absurd Venetian disguise. But Bram was the ghost of old London itself—a London that was fast dying, though here in Greenwich it might seem to be as full of vitality as ever. It was the London of sweet lavender and cherry ripe, the London of hot cockles, of Punch and Judy shows and four-wheelers and lumbering knife-board omnibuses, of gas-lamps and queer beggars. Bram’s incarnation of this vanishing city had that authentic whimsicality (the very term is nearly unintelligible now) of old cockney humour, an urban Puckishness as if for a while Robin Goodfellow had tried to keep pace with the times and live in great cities. He made his audience feel that sausages were only strung together because it was more amusing to steal a string than a single sausage. His red-hot poker itself glowed with such a geniality of warmth as made the audience feel that everybody to whose seat it