He does suffer so with his trousers. He has to stop and pull them up about twice every minute. One of these days, if he is not careful, there will be an accident happen to those trousers. If the stage sailor will follow our advice, he will be warned in time and will get a […]

He says “Shure” and “Bedad” and in moments of exultation “Beghorra.” That is all the Irish he knows. He is very poor, but scrupulously honest. His great ambition is to pay his rent, and he is devoted to his landlord. He is always cheerful and always good. We never knew a bad Irishman on the […]

Ah! he is a cute one, he is. Possibly in real life he would not be deemed anything extraordinary, but by contrast with the average of stage men and women, any one who is not a born fool naturally appears somewhat Machiavellian. He is the only man in the play who does not swallow all […]

They are so clean. We have seen peasantry off the stage, and it has presented an untidy–occasionally a disreputable and unwashed–appearance; but the stage peasant seems to spend all his wages on soap and hair-oil. They are always round the corner–or rather round the two corners–and they come on in a couple of streams and […]

He has lost his wife. But he knows where she is–among the angels! She isn’t all gone, because the heroine has her hair. “Ah, you’ve got your mother’s hair,” says the good old man, feeling the girl’s head all over as she kneels beside him. Then they all wipe away a tear. The people on […]

There are two types of servant-girl to be met with on the stage. This is an unusual allowance for one profession. There is the lodging-house slavey. She has a good heart and a smutty face and is always dressed according to the latest fashion in scarecrows. Her leading occupation is the cleaning of boots. She […]

Oh, they are funny! The comic lovers’ mission in life is to serve as a sort of “relief” to the misery caused the audience by the other characters in the play; and all that is wanted now is something that will be a relief to the comic lovers. They have nothing to do with the […]

He is very old, and very long, and very thin. He has white hair. He dresses in the costume of the last generation but seven. He has bushy eyebrows and is clean shaven. His chin itches considerably, so that he has to be always scratching it. His favorite remark is “Ah!” In real life we […]

She sits on a table and smokes a cigarette. A cigarette on the stage is always the badge of infamy. In real life the cigarette is usually the hall-mark of the particularly mild and harmless individual. It is the dissipation of the Y.M.C.A.; the innocent joy of the pure-hearted boy long ere the demoralizing influence […]

He wears a clean collar and smokes a cigarette; that is how we know he is a villain. In real life it is often difficult to tell a villain from an honest man, and this gives rise to mistakes; but on the stage, as we have said villains wear clean collars and smoke cigarettes, and […]

She is always in trouble–and don’t she let you know it, too! Her life is undeniably a hard one. Nothing goes right with her. We all have our troubles, but the stage heroine never has anything else. If she only got one afternoon a week off from trouble or had her Sundays free it would […]

He follows the hero all over the world. This is rough on the hero. What makes him so gone on the hero is that when they were boys together the hero used to knock him down and kick him. The comic man remembers this with a glow of pride when he is grown up, and […]

CHARACTERS MR. TRAVERS. MRS. TRAVERS. MARION [their daughter]. DAN [a gentleman of no position]. * * * * * SCENE: A room opening upon a garden. The shadows creep from their corners, driving before them the fading twilight. MRS. TRAVERS sits in a wickerwork easy chair. MR. TRAVERS, smoking a cigar, sits the other side […]

“It doesn’t suit you at all,” I answered. “You’re very disagreeable,” said she, “I shan’t ever ask your advice again.” “Nobody,” I hastened to add, “would look well in it. You, of course, look less awful in it than any other woman would, but it’s not your style.” “He means,” exclaimed the Minor Poet, “that […]

They say, the chroniclers who have written the history of that low-lying, wind-swept coast, that years ago the foam fringe of the ocean lay further to the east; so that where now the North Sea creeps among the treacherous sand-reefs, it was once dry land. In those days, between the Abbey and the sea, there […]

He got in at Ipswich with seven different weekly papers under his arm. I noticed that each one insured its reader against death or injury by railway accident. He arranged his luggage upon the rack above him, took off his hat and laid it on the seat beside him, mopped his bald head with a […]

Richard Dunkerman and I had been old school-fellows, if a gentleman belonging to the Upper Sixth, and arriving each morning in a “topper” and a pair of gloves, and “a discredit to the Lower Fourth,” in a Scotch cap, can by any manner of means be classed together. And though in those early days a […]

I first met Jack Burridge nearly ten years ago on a certain North-country race-course. The saddling bell had just rung for the chief event of the day. I was sauntering along with my hands in my pockets, more interested in the crowd than in the race, when a sporting friend, crossing on his way to […]

Bump. Bump. Bump-bump. Bump. I sat up in bed and listened intently. It seemed to me as if someone with a muffled hammer were trying to knock bricks out of the wall. “Burglars,” I said to myself (one assumes, as a matter of course, that everything happening in this world after 1 a.m. is due […]

“Not the Mr. —, really?“ In her deep brown eyes there lurked pleased surprise, struggling with wonder. She looked from myself to the friend who introduced us with a bewitching smile of incredulity, tempered by hope. He assured her, adding laughingly, “The only genuine and original,” and left us. “I’ve always thought of you as […]