And there she sat, true to her word, creaking in her black silk and bugles (with the bottom buttons undone!), perspiring greasily over her fat red face; and shouting rough, humorous, and frequently shrewd criticism at our amateurs during rehearsal until midnight, when we went out to the dining-room for oysters, egg-nogg, and the too lavish entertainment of Colonel Pallinder's sideboard. The first time this occurred Teddy Johns retreated precipitately from the table, and, being sought, was discovered at last, pallidly reclining on the library lounge. "I'm all right, old man," he said feebly. "Just a minute, please. I couldn't stand seeing old Mrs. Botlisch wallop down those oysters, that's all." There lies before me now a square of rough paper (designedly rough), with jagged edges (designedly jagged), tinted in water colours an elegant cloudy blue, with a butterfly, or some such insect, painted in one corner, and a slit diagonally opposite through which we stuck a single rosebud, as I remember. Slanting across the sheet in loose gilt lettering I read "Programme," and a date beneath. This confection represented days of effort and ingenuity on the part of those young ladies among my contemporaries who painted china, or were otherwise "artistic." Some of them took the "Art Amateur," at a ruinous expenditure; that publication has long since gone the way of all flesh and most print, in company, it would appear, with the amateurs for whom it was destined. Nobody is either "artistic" or amateurish any more. We did the jagging with a meat-saw, I believe--what a spectacle for our accomplished posterity! If I reverse the sheet, I find upon the other side, in a correct angular hand (it may well be my own, for angularity was much the fashion in those days; and the inartistic ones let what aid they could to the task of programme-making), I find, I say, the CAST OF CHARACTERS WILLIAM TELL, An Opera in Two Acts. William Tell Mr. Archer Baldwin Lewis Arnold von Winkelreid Mr. James Hathaway Walter Furst Mr. Julian Todd Melcthal Mr. Appleton Wingate Gessler Mr. James Smith Rudolph Mr. John Porter Ruodi Mr. Joseph Randall McHenry Leuthold Mr. Henry Barnes Smith Matilda Mr. Gwynne Peters Mrs. Tell Mr. Oliver Hunt Mrs. Gessler Mr. Theodore E. Johns Jemmy, Tell's son Mr. Junius Brutus Breckinridge Taylor Chorus of Peasants, Knights, Pages, Ladies, Hunters, Soldiers, etc. Mr. Robert Carson Scene: The Schactenthal Waterfall.