“May God help you to-night, Tom! My thoughts will be at the theatre with you. Good-bye.” Mrs. Jones's daughter had promised to look in at Mrs. Mogley now and then during the evening, and to give her the medicine at the proper intervals. Mogley reported to the stage manager, who showed him Renshaw's dressing-room and gave him Renshaw's costume for the part. His mind ever turning back to the little room at the top of the house and then to the words and “business” of his part, he got into Renshaw's red tights and crimson cape. Then he donned the scarlet cap and plume and pasted the exaggerated eyebrows upon his forehead, while the stage manager stood by, giving him hints as to new “business” invented by Renshaw. “You have the stage to yourself, you know, at that time, for a specialty.” “Yes, I'll sing the song Wilkins did there. I see it's marked in the part and the orchestra must be 'up' in it. In the second act I'll do some imitations of actors.” At eight he was ready to go on the stage. “May God be with you!” reëchoed in his ear,--the echo of a weak voice put forth with an effort. He heard the stage manager in front of the curtain announcing that, “owing to Mr. Renshaw's sudden illness, the talented comedian, Mr. Thomas Mogley, had kindly consented to play Mephisto, at short notice, without a rehearsal.” He had never heard himself called a talented comedian before, and he involuntarily held his head a trifle higher as the startling and delicious words reached his ears. The opening chorus, the witless dialogue of secondary personages, then an almost empty stage, old Faust alone remaining, and the entrance of Mephisto. Some applause that came from people that had not heard the preliminary announcement, and whose demonstration was intended for Renshaw, rather disconcerted Mogley. Then, ere he had spoken a word, or his eyes had ranged over the hazy lighted theatre on the other side of the footlights, there sounded in the depths of his brain: “My thoughts will be at the theatre with you!” There were many vacant seats in the house. He singled out one of them on the front row and imagined she was in it. He would play to that vacant seat throughout the evening. In all burlesques of “Faust” the rôle of Mephisto is the leading comic figure. The actor who assumes it undertakes to make people laugh. Mogley made people laugh that night, but it was not his intentional humourous efforts that excited their hilarity. It was the man himself. They began by jeering him quietly. Then the gallery grew bold. “Ah there, Edwin Booth!” sarcastically yelled an urchin aloft. “Oh, what a funny little man he is!” ironically quoted another from a song in one of Mr. Hoyt's farces, alluding to Mogley's spare if elongated frame. “He t'inks dis is a tragedy,” suggested a Bowery youth. But Mogley tried not to heed.