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Glazed calico is the amateur costume-maker’s best friend. It is cheap, it is shiny, and it can be had in all the most effective colours. I have never seen a very good green; but the turquoise blue, the pink, and the yellow, are of those pretty Dresden china shades which Mr. Marcus Ward and other Christmas-card makers use to such good purpose against gold backgrounds. Many of these Christmas cards, by the bye, with children dressed in ancient costumes painted by good artists, will give you and your sisters help in a tasteful combination of colours; and besides the gold and silver powder paints, which answer admirably, gold and silver paper can be had to cut stars and trimmings of various sorts from, to stitch or gum on to fairies’ dresses, etc.

Tarlatan can now be had in hues that almost rival the colours of flowers, but I fear that only the white can be had “fire-proof.” Gauze wings, flowing hair, and tarlatan skirts, combined with the “flurry” of the performances, the confined space behind the scenes, and lights everywhere, form a dangerous combination which it makes one shudder to think of. The truth is, my dear Rouge Pot, it cannot be too often or too emphatically repeated that naked lights on the stage or behind the scenes in amateur theatricals are as wrong as in a coal-mine. Glass shades for the bedroom candles–with which boy-brothers, seeing imperfectly through masks, will rush past little sisters whose newly-crimped hair and tarlatan skirts are sticking out, they can’t feel how far behind them–cost a few shillings, and the mental effort of resolving to have and use them. Depend upon it, Rouge Pot, the latter is the greater difficulty! And yet our petty economies in matters which affect our health, our daily comfort, or our lives, are wonderful, when the dangers or discomforts we have to avert may, by chance, be averted by good luck at no cost at all. So perhaps the few shillings have something to do with it. I hope they will always be expended on safety glasses for all lights in use on or about your stage.

Well, glazed calico and tarlatan are very effective, and so is cotton velvet or velveteen; but in every family there will probably be found a few articles of finery originally made of expensive materials, but which are now yielded to the juvenile property-box, and from experience I can assure you that these are valuable treasures. I have a tender remembrance of a few which were our pieces de resistance when we “dressed up” either for charades or one of Miss Corner’s plays–“in my young days.” A black satin dress–ancient, but of such lustre and softness as satins are not made now; a real camel’s-hair burnous, dyed crimson; a green satin driving cloak, lined with fur–these things did not crush and tumble during their long periods of repose in the property-box, as tarlatan skirts and calico doublets were apt to do. Most valuable of all, a grey wig, worn right side foremost by our elderly gentlemen, and wrong side foremost (so as to bring the pig-tail curls over the forehead) by our elderly ladies. Fur gloves, which, with a black rabbit-skin mask over her rosy cheeks, gave ferocity in the part of “the Beast” to our jolliest little actress. A pair of claret-coloured stockings, silk throughout, and a pair of yellow leather slippers, embroidered with gold, doubtless bought long years back in some Eastern bazaar, etc., etc. There came a date in our theatrical history when only one pair of feet could get right into these much-desired shoes, heels and all; and as the individual who owned them was also supposed to display the claret-coloured stockings to the best advantage, both these important properties, with the part of Prince to which our custom assigned them, fell to an actor who could lay no other claim to pre-eminence.