The _corps dramatique_ of Tom Airay consisted chiefly of young men, (they had no actresses,) who moved in the same line of life as the manager, and whose characters were equally respectable with his, which was always unassailable; for, setting aside our hero’s occasionally getting tipsy at some of the neighbouring feasts, nothing can be said against him. He is a worthy member of society, has brought up a large family respectably, and, if report speak truth, has realized about a thousand pounds. Few of Tom Airay’s company are living, and the names of many have escaped me. There was honest Peter W----, whose face peeped from behind the green curtain like the full moon. He was accounted a bit of a wag: ever foremost in mischief, he, more than once, almost blew up the stage by gunpowder, half suffocated the audience by assafœtida, and was wont to put hot cinders in the boots of his associates. He has “left the mimic scene to die indeed,” and sleeps peacefully under the beautiful lime-trees of Kirby Malhamdale church-yard, undisturbed by the murmur of that mountain stream, which, rippling over its pebbly channel, hymns, as it were, his requiem. Then there was Isaac G----, the fiddler and comic singer: _he_ exists no longer. There was Waddilove, and Frankland of Hetton, and Bill Cliff, the Skipton poet and bailiff--all dead! There were, also, the Hetheringtons, and Jack Solomon the besom maker, and Tommy Summersgill the barber and clock maker, and Jack L---- the politician of Threshfield, who regarded John Wilkes as his tutelary saint, and settled in the Illinois, from whence he occasionally sends a letter to his old friends, informing them what a paltry country England is, what a paradise the new world is, and how superior the American rivers are to those “That through our vallies run Singing and dancing in the gleams Of summer’s cloudless sun.” Besides these, there were fifteen or sixteen others from Arncliffe, Litton, Coniston, Kilnsay, and the other romantic villages that enliven our heath-clad hills.