He had entered “the profession” from the amateur stage, by way of the comic opera chorus, and to that chance was due his being located in the comic opera wing of the great histrionic edifice. He had originally preferred tragedy, but the first consideration was the getting upon the stage by any means. Having industriously worked his way out of the chorus, he had been reconciled by habit to his environment, and had come to aspire to eminence therein. He had reached the standing of a secondary comedian,--that is to say, a man playing secondary comic rôles in the pieces for which he is cast. He was useful in such companies as were directly or indirectly controlled by their leading comedians, for there never could be any fears of his outshining those autocratic personages. Only in his wildest hopes did he ever look upon the centre of the stage as a spot possible for him to attain. His means of evoking laughter upon the stage were laborious on his part and mystifying to the thoughtful observer. He took noticeable means to change from his real self. It mattered not what was the nature of the part he filled, he invariably assumed an unnatural, rasping voice; he stretched his mouth to its utmost reach and lowered the extremities of his lips; he turned his toes inward (naturally his feet described an abnormal angle) and bowed his arms. Brought up in the school which teaches that to make others laugh one must never smile one's self, he wore a grotesquely lugubrious and changeless countenance. Such was Newgag in his every impersonation. When he thought he was funniest, he appeared to be in most pain and was most depressing. “My methods are legitimate,” he would say, when he had enlisted one's attention and apparent admiration across a table bearing beer-bottles and sandwiches. “The people want horse-play nowadays. But when I've got to descend to that sort of thing, I'll go to the variety stage or circus ring at once--or quit.” “That's a happy thought, old man,” said a comedian of the younger school, one night, when Newgag had uttered his wonted speech. “Why don't you quit?” Such a speech sufficed to rob Newgag of his self-possession and to reduce him to silence. He could not cope with easy, offhand, impromptu jesters. In truth, no one tried more than Newgag to excel in “horse-play,” but his temperament or his training did not equip him for excelling in it; he defended the monotony, emptiness, and toilsomeness of his humour on the ground that it was “legitimate.” One night Newgag drank two glasses of beer in rapid succession and looked at me with a touching countenance. “Old boy,” he said, in his homely drawl, “I'm discouraged! I begin to think I'm not in it!” “Why, what's wrong?” “Well, I've dropped to the fact that, after all these years in the business, I can't make them laugh.”