But the "masher" is only a fraction of the class of amusement patrons to which attention has been called in the opening sentence of this chapter. Apart from the people who deem it their duty to come tramping into the theatre while the performance is going on, and whose coming is followed by a triumphal flourish of banging seats, and the heaving footbeats of hurrying ushers, to the intense disgust of all who care to hear the first act of the play, there are others who have a hundred ways of annoying an audience, and who make a very effectual use of their gifts in this direction. There is the member of the "profesh,"--the gaseous advance agent, or the bloviate business manager, the actor "up a stump," or the "super" who has played the part of a silent but spectacular lictor with John McCullough or Tom Keene, and who sits in the rear of the house, but sufficiently forward to be distinctly heard by people in the dress circle, criticising the mannerisms of the ladies or gentlemen on the stage and "guying" everybody in the cast from the star down to the frightened and stiff-kneed little ballet girl whom an inscrutable Providence has allowed to wander in upon the scene occasionally, to say, "Yes, mum," or "No, mum." The leisurely but loud professional who thus disports himself must necessarily enjoy a large share of the audience's attention, and the more of this he attracts the more he is encouraged to be extravagant in his criticisms and unreserved in his elocution. He sometimes must dispute the title to obstreperous obtrusiveness with some liquor-laden auditor who has succeeded in passing the door-keeper only to find that the heat of the house has accelerated his inebriation and given freedom and license to his tongue until the "bouncer" lifts him out of his seat by the collar and deposits him in a reflective and emetic mood on the curbstone in front of the theatre. Then, too, a crowd of friends sometimes get together in the parquette, who begin a conversation before the first curtain rises and keep it going on in careless and annoying tones until the final flourish of the orchestra arrives with the dimming of the lights as the audience files out. But if the loud members of the "profesh," the interjective inebriate, and the crowd of communicative friends are not on hand to furnish diversion for the folks who are trying to follow what is going forward on the stage, there is one other never-failing source of distraction and annoyance--the giddy and gushing usher. It is safe to bet that just when the most pathetic passage of a play is reached, or the tragedian is singing smallest, a few ushers will throw themselves hastily together in the lobby and hold a mass meeting long and loud enough to be taken for a November night political meeting, if there were only a stake wagon and a few Chinese lanterns strewn around. Indeed, the usher seems to assume that he is a sort of safety-valve through which a disturbance must break out now and then to offset