But when the curtain went up on "Mrs. Tankerville's Tiara," and the moment arrived when Huddesley must appear as Teddy with no disguise save that of a livery and false whiskers, we trembled for the success of the deception. We might have spared our worry; Huddesley came on in the ballroom scene with which the play opened, handing a tray of ices--and he was so like Teddy in face and movements that even upon the stage where the devices of his make-up could be studied close at hand, the effect was startling. _Plus roi que le roi_, he was; he passed his tray not like a butler imitating a gentleman, but like a gentleman imitating a butler; he dropped his _h's_ and stumblingly forgot to drop them with all Teddy's humorous self-consciousness. He managed his double part so well, no light task even for a finished actor, that he achieved a kind of equality with us; we forgot that he was Doctor Vardaman's servant. The thing was so much a matter for gratulations that I think we scarcely remembered it was also a matter for wonder. If J. B. or the other men felt any uneasiness they did not reveal it; but, so ingenuously self-centred is youth, it is probable we were much too deeply interested, everyone in his own appearance and the impression he was making, to be genuinely concerned about anybody else. The audience about whom I had had such fearsome fancies must have been singularly lenient, even more so than such audiences usually are to such performers. My recollection is that, excepting Huddesley, we were too bad even to be funny. "Mrs. Tankerville" is a good stirring comedy-drama, of the type Boucicault and Tom Taylor made so popular during the quarter-century succeeding 1850; there is an abundance of vivid dialogue, with plenty of "points," and plenty of "situations." But what it all became in our hands is a dire memory. Mazie, it is true, made a splendid figure on the stage, and was quite dashing and theatrical, but she forgot two-thirds of her lines, and in the great scene where she accused Muriel of the robbery, had to be prompted at every other word. And Muriel--well, there was no blinking the fact, Muriel was a "stick." She was so big and gentle and honest-looking that no sane person in stage-land or out of it, could have suspected her for a moment of anything more criminal, say, than hopping into bed to say her prayers because her feet were cold! The excitement flushed her so that it was visible through her paint, and she did not look so statuesquely calm and finished as usual; nervousness, which is unbecoming to everybody, set particularly ill on a person of her weight and inches. She knew every word of her part, and recited it with the conscientiousness which she would have shown to the Catechism--and with much the same expression! She replied to Mazie's halting tirades in the tone and with the air of someone declining a cup of afternoon tea. "Will you drive me into the street?" she remarked amiably, and her