"Miss Constance Greenwood, the new actress!" "Go and see Constance Greenwood on the 18th!" "Constance Greenwood as Lady Malkinshaw!" Such were the placards in enormous letters which glared upon Laurence Alsager from every dead wall and hoarding on his passage from the railway-station to his old rooms in Jermyn Street. Laurence could not forbear smiling as he glanced at them--could not forbear a laugh as, at the Club over his dinner, he read the advertisements of the forthcoming appearance of Miss Greenwood at the Theatre Royal, Hatton Garden, for which national establishment she had been secured by the _impresario_, Mr. Wuff, at an expense hitherto unparalleled--at least so said the advertisements. Yes; Mr. Wuff had done it at last! He had cut himself adrift from the moorings of mediocrity, as his nautical dramatist expressed it, and it was now sink or swim with him. He was "going in a perisher," he said himself; and having set his fortune on a die, he was just waiting to see whether it turned up six or ace. When Mr. Wuff came into a sum of money on the death of a distant relative, and, forsaking the necessary but hardly popular calling of a sheriff's-officer, took the Theatre Royal, Hatton Garden, and opened it with a revival of the legitimate drama in general and of Shakespearian plays in particular, he made a very great hit. It was so long since any one had attempted to represent Shakespeare, that an entirely new generation had sprung up, which, egged on by its elders, went religiously to the first performance of all the celebrated plays, and tried very hard indeed to think they both understood and liked them. The newspaper press too was very noble on the subject. Mr. Wuff, so said the critics, was the great dramatic resuscitator of the age.