What shall I assume the first piece that is to be performed this night to be? Will you have the “Flowers of the Forest,” the “Poor Strollers,” “Sweethearts and Wives,” “Pizarro,” the “Padlock,” or a “Game at Romps?” What do you say to a fine old English comedy, such as “John Bull,” or the “School of Reform,” with a dissipated young squire, a gouty, ill-tempered, and over-bearing old lord of the manor, an intensely-virtuous tenant-farmer, a comic ploughman, a milkmaid with a chintz gown tucked through the placket-holes, and a song, and a spotless but a persecuted maiden? No; you will have none of these! Suppose, then, we take our dear old genial friend, the “Green Bushes”—long life and good luck to Mr. Buckstone, and may he write many more pieces as good for our imaginary theatre. See; the green-room clock points to ten minutes to seven—I left that out in my inventory of the furniture. The call-boy has already warned the ladies and gentlemen who are engaged for the first scene, that their immediate presence is required, and the erst-deserted green-room fills rapidly. See, here they came—the kindly old friends of the “Green Bushes”—Miami and Jack Gong, and Master Grinnidge; and yet, dear me, what are these strange, wild costumes mingled with them? Oh! there is a burlesque after the drama. It is somewhat early in the evening for those who are to play in the second piece to come down dressed; but then you are to consider this as a special green-room, a specimen green-room, an amalgam of the green-room element generally. This model _foyer_ is to have something of the Haymarket and something of the Adelphi—the old by-gone, defunct Adelphi, I mean—a spice of the Olympic, a tinge of the Lyceum, and a dash of the Princess’s, about it. I except the green-room of Drury Lane, which never resembled anything half so much as a family vault, and the green-rooms of the two Operas, which, though splendidly furnished and appointed, are almost deserted during the performances, the great _tenori_ and _soprani_ preferring to retire to their dressing-rooms when any long intervals of rest occur. “Things”—to use a bit of “Green Bushes” _facetiæ_, invented, I am willing to believe, by that incorrigible humourist, Mr. Wright, and which has grown proverbial—“things isn’t as they used to was;” and the attractions of green-rooms have deteriorated, even within my time. When I say “my time,” I mean a quarter of a century; for as I happened to be almost born in a prompt-box and weaned in a scene-painter’s size-kettle, and have been employed in very nearly every capacity in and about a theatre—save that of an actor, which profession invincible modesty and incurable incompetency prevented me from assuming—I feel myself qualified to speak about the green-rooms with some degree of authority. To have read a three-act melodrama to a (scarcely) admiring audience, and to have called “everybody for the last scene” in a green-room, gives a man, I take it, a right to be heard.