Returning to the subject of the chapter, there are several instances of actors and actresses, prominent and minor, receiving their death strokes on the stage while playing. Mistress Woffington, known as "lovely Peggy," while playing at Covent Garden, London, May 3, 1757, fell to the stage at the end of the fourth act of "As You Like it," in which she was playing _Rosalind_, and after muttering "O God! O God!" was carried home to die after a lingering confinement of three years to her bed. George Frederick Cooke received his death stroke in New York, while playing _Sir Giles Overreach_, and Edmund Kean died in England under similar circumstances. The elder Kean and his son Charles were playing together, the former having the role of _Othello_, the latter that of _Iago_. The date was March 25, 1833. The event, says a chronicler, created great excitement among play-goers; the house was crammed. Kean, who had worn himself out with dissipation, went through the part, "dying as he went," until he came to the "Farewell," and the strangely appropriate words, "Othello's occupation's gone." Then he gasped for breath and fell upon his son's shoulder, moaning, "I am dying--speak to them for me!" And so the curtain descended upon him--forever. His wife had separated from him. "Come home to me; forget and forgive!" he wrote her after he had been conveyed to Richmond. And she came. An hour before he died he sprang out of bed, exclaiming, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" and he expired with the dying words of Octavian, "Farewell, Flo---- Floranthe!" upon his lips. This was on May 15, 1833, and he was buried in Richmond churchyard. Instances of the same appalling kind might be multiplied, but it is not the purpose of the writer to cover the stage with gloom, or to cause death to masquerade any more than is absolutely necessary before the foot-lights. More interest will be felt, and the heart will be lighter and the appetite better, if we turn to the ludicrous incidents that have caused audiences ready to shed tears over a tragedy, to turn from the lachrymose attitude to one which might be represented as laughter holding both his sides. [Illustration: "PIN UP MY SKIRTS."] Sol Smith tells a funny story about his earliest experiences on the stage; how he stole in through the back door before the performance, and hid in what he thought was a chest, but which turned out to be the coffin used in the play that evening, and when it was carried out on the stage young Smith was so terrified that he pushed up the lid and bounded out, to the surprise of both actors and audience. N. M. Ludlow, who was Smith's partner in the theatrical business, relates a somewhat similar incident about himself.