the quiet of the audience. If the usher isn't plying his fiendish proclivity, some bald-headed man in the parquette is sure to throw his skating rink over the back of the seat, and, with shining brow turned up towards the sun-burner in the dome, mouth rounded out like the base of a cupola and nostrils working like a suction pump, his beautiful snore will rise above the wildest roar of the orchestra and drown the mellifluous racket of the big bass drum, until some friendly hand disturbs the dreamer, and the "or-g-g-g-g-g-g-g!" that rushes up his nostrils, down his throat and out through his ears, is thus gently and perhaps only temporarily interrupted. The enthusiast--the man who is carried away by the spirit of the scene--is also a source of annoyance, and when he signifies from the balcony his willingness to take a hand in what is being enacted on the stage, damning the villain heartily, and, like the sailor of old, openly sympathizing with femininity in distress, he first becomes a target for the gallery boys' gutter-wit and finally a prey to the inexorable "bouncer," who roams around the upper tiers of every theatre and unceremoniously dumps disturbers down stairs. Last, but by no means least, in the distracting and disturbing features at theatrical performances is the peanut cruncher. He is the most cold-blooded and least excusable of all the annoyances with which amusement patrons are afflicted. He wraps his teeth around the roasted goober, utterly reckless of the distress he is stirring up in the bosoms of those around him, and he grinds and smacks and continues to crunch, stopping occasionally to charge his dental quartz-crusher anew, and always beginning on the latest goober with the greatest ferocity, while he seems to make it go ten times further, as far as time and agony are concerned, than any of its predecessors. All the other disturbance consequent upon attending a play are petty, compared with peanut-crunching, and it is the opinion of the writer that a law should be passed at once, making it a felony for any banana-stand or hand-cart man to sell peanuts to citizens who are on their way to the theatre. If such a law were passed, and if it were not a dead letter, the people whose backbones feel as if they were being fondled by a circular saw every time they hear the rustling of a goober-shell, would flop right down on their knees and renew their confidence in the wisdom of Providence.