And this is why I know nothing more delightful than the spectacle of a score of children playing at life on the stage. They may have been taught how to speak and how to stand, and what to do with their hands; they may know how to take a prompt, and realise the importance of dressing the stage; every trick and mannerism of the grown-up actor or actress may be theirs; yet, through their playing there will sound the voice of childhood, imaginative, adventurous, insistent, and every performance will supply them with materials for a new game. So it was with these children, whose sudden coming had strewn the melancholy beach with pearls. I had seen them in the dimness of a ballet-room under Drury Lane Theatre; now, with a coin, I bought the right to see them on a stage built with cynical impertinence in the midst of the intolerant sea. The play, indeed, was the same, and the players, but the game was different. The little breaks and falterings which the author had not designed, the only half-suppressed laughings which were not in the prompt-copy, bore no relationship, one might suppose, to the moral adventures of Mother Goose. But far across the hills the spring was breaking the buds on the lilac, and far along the shore the sea was casting its jewels, and even there in the theatre I could see the children standing on tiptoe to pick lilac, and stooping on the sands to gather pearls. They did not see that they were in a place of lank ropes and unsmoothed boards soiled with the dust of forgotten pageants and rendered hideous by the glare of electric lights; and they were right. For in their eyes there shone only that place of adventure which delights the feet of the faithful, whether they tread the sands, or the stage, or the rough cobbles of Drury Lane. To the truly imaginative a theatre is a place of uncommon possibilities; our actors and actresses, and even our limelight-men, are not imaginative, and so, I suppose, they find it ugly. The game is with the children.