then his memory failed him, and he stuck fast. The prompter whispered "drugs fit;" but stage fright had seized him, and he could not take the word. He tried back, but stuck again at the same place. Half-a-dozen people were all prompting him at the same time now, but all in vain. At length one more practical than the rest whispered angrily, "Pour the poison in his ear and get off." The suggestion restored a glimmering of reason to the trembling, perspiring wretch. He could not remember the words of Shakespeare, so he improvised a line. Advancing to the sleeping figure, he raised the vial in his hand, and in a terribly tragic tone shouted, "Into his ear-hole this I'll _power_!" Some extraordinary and agonising mistakes, for tragedians, have been made in what are called the flying messages in "Richard III." and "Macbeth," by novices in their nervousness mixing up their own parts with the context; as when Catesby rushed on and cried, "My lord, the Duke of Buckingham's taken." There he should have stopped while Richard replied, "Off with his head! so much for Buckingham!" But in his flurry the shaking messenger added, "and they've cut off his head!" With a furious look at having been robbed of one of his finest "points," the tragedian roared out, "Then, damn you, go and stick it on again!" Another story is told of an actor playing one of the officers in the fifth act of "Macbeth." "My lord," he has to say, "there are ten thousand----" "Geese, villain," interrupts Macbeth. "Ye--es, my lord!" answered the messenger, losing his memory in his terror. But a far more dreadful anecdote is related of the same play. A star was playing the guilty Thane in a very small company, where each member had to sustain three or four different characters. During the performance the man appointed to play the first murderer was taken ill. There was not another to be spared, and the only resource left was to send on a supernumerary, supposed to be intelligent, to stand for the character. "Keep close to the wing," said the prompter; "I'll read you the words, and you can repeat them after me." The scene was the banquet; the supper was pushed on, and Macbeth, striding down the stage, seized his arm and said in a stage whisper, "There's blood upon thy face." "'Tis Banquo's, then," was the prompt. Lost and bewildered--having never spoken in his life before upon the stage--by the tragedian's intense yet natural tones, the fellow, imitating them in the most confidential manner, answered, "Is there, by God?" put his hand up to his forehead, and, finding it stained with rose pink, added, "Then the property man's served me a trick!"