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And then, again, it is something extraordinary, when you come to think of it, what a tremendous amount of killing some of them can stand and still come up smiling in the next act, not a penny the worse for it. They get stabbed, and shot, and thrown over precipices thousands of feet high and, bless you, it does them good–it is like a tonic to them.

As for the young man that is coming home to see his girl, you simply can’t kill him. Achilles was a summer rose compared with him. Nature and mankind have not sufficient materials in hand as yet to kill that man. Science has but the strength of a puling babe against his invulnerability. You can waste your time on earthquakes and shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, floods, explosions, railway accidents, and such like sort of things, if you are foolish enough to do so; but it is no good your imagining that anything of the kind can hurt him, because it can’t.

There will be thousands of people killed, thousands in each instance, but one human being will always escape, and that one human being will be the stage young man who is coming home to see his girl.

He is forever being reported as dead, but it always turns out to be another fellow who was like him or who had on his (the young man’s) hat. He is bound to be out of it, whoever else may be in.

“If I had been at my post that day,” he explains to his sobbing mother, “I should have been blown up, but the Providence that watches over good men had ordained that I should be laying blind drunk in Blogg’s saloon at the time the explosion took place, and so the other engineer, who had been doing my work when it was his turn to be off, was killed along with the whole of the crew.”

“Ah, thank Heaven, thank Heaven for that!” ejaculates the pious old lady, and the comic man is so overcome with devout joy that he has to relieve his overstrained heart by drawing his young woman on one side and grossly insulting her.

All attempts to kill this young man ought really to be given up now. The job has been tried over and over again by villains and bad people of all kinds, but no one has ever succeeded. There has been an amount of energy and ingenuity expended in seeking to lay up that one man which, properly utilized, might have finished off ten million ordinary mortals. It is sad to think of so much wasted effort.

He, the young man coming home to see his girl, need never take an insurance ticket or even buy a Tit Bits. It would be needless expenditure in his case.

On the other hand, and to make matters equal, as it were, there are some stage people so delicate that it is next door to impossible to keep them alive.

The inconvenient husband is a most pathetic example of this. Medical science is powerless to save that man when the last act comes round; indeed, we doubt whether medical science, in its present state of development, could even tell what is the matter with him or why he dies at all. He looks healthy and robust enough and nobody touches him, yet down he drops, without a word of warning, stone-dead, in the middle of the floor–he always dies in the middle of the floor. Some folks like to die in bed, but stage people don’t. They like to die on the floor. We all have our different tastes.

The adventuress herself is another person who dies with remarkable ease. We suppose in her case it is being so used to it that makes her so quick and clever at it. There is no lingering illness and doctors’ bills and upsetting of the whole household arrangements about her method. One walk round the stage and the thing is done.