Salvini surpassed himself, perhaps on account of the presence of her Majesty, whose eyes never wandered from the stage, except in the _entr'actes_, when she responded to the ovation the public always makes wherever she appears. She rose and bowed with her sweet smile, the smile which wins all hearts. There was only one hitch during the performance, and that was when Hamlet and Polonius fought the duel; the latter, unfortunately, missed his aim and speared Hamlet's wig with his sword, on which it stuck in spite of the most desperate efforts to shake it off. Salvini, all unconscious, continued fencing until he caught sight of his wig dangling in the air and, realizing his un-Hamlet-like bald head, backed out into the side-wing, leaving Polonius to get off the stage as best he could. In the _entr'acte_ Monsieur de W. and I talked over the play, and, unfortunately, I said, "Did Hamlet ever exist?" A bomb exploding under our noses could not have been more disastrous! He burst out in indignant tones, and we almost came to literary blows in our violent discussion. M. de W. insists upon it that Shakespeare knew all about Hamlet and where he lived, the medieval clothes he wore, and that he was the sepulchral Prince with whom we are so familiar; that Ophelia was a very misused and unhappy young lady, who drowned herself in a water-lily pond; and that Hamlet's papa used to come nights and scare the life out of the courtiers. "Wait a little," I said. "I flatter myself that I know the story of Hamlet thoroughly. I spent all last summer studying the old Danish chronicle, which was written in Latin in 1200 by a monk called Saxo Grammaticus, then translated into old-fashioned Danish, which I translated, to amuse myself, into English. If what Saxo says is true Hamlet lived about two or three hundred years before Christ." "Impossible!" almost screamed my friend. I went on, regardless of M. de W.'s dangerous attitude: "Denmark at that time was divided into several kingdoms, and Hamlet's father was king in a part of Jutland, which, let us say, was as small as Rhode Island--" "What nonsense!" interrupted M. de W., indignantly. "He probably went about in fur-covered legs and a sheepskin over his shoulders, as was then the fashion. He was called Amleth; Shakespeare simply transposed the h. He was a naughty little boy, vicious and revengeful. He despised his mother and hated his uncle, who was his stepfather." [Illustration: TWO YOUNG QUEENS From a photograph, taken in 1878, of the two daughters of the King of Denmark. They were then the Princess of Wales and the Grand Duchess Dagmar. They are now the widows of two European sovereigns, Dowager Queen Alexandra of England and the Dowager Empress of Russia. They spend their summers together in a small cottage near Copenhagen. Alexandra is on the right of the picture.] "Why?" asked, in a milder tone, M. de W.