REASONING ANIMAL.  “My daughter!  I see you are passionately in love with LIONEL.  Therefore, as I know him to be a fine young fellow, you must never see him more.” (Enter COMIC YANKEE.)

COMIC YANKEE.  “Here’s your new banjo, Miss MAY.  Play us something comic and depressing.”

MAY.  “Thank Heaven, I can get at the banjo at last” (Plays and is encored a dozen times.)

COMIC YANKEE.  “Miss MAY, you must go and take a walk.” (She goes.) “LIONEL, you are well enough to leave this ranche.  Get up and get.”

LIONEL.  “Farewell, beloved whiskey shop.  Tell MAY I am going to leave her, and give her my sketches.  If she once looks at them, she can love me no longer.” (Goes out to slow music.  Re-enter MAY.)

MAY.  “The wretch has left me without a word.  I will bury his infamous sketches under the floor.  They may frighten away the rats.” (Pulls up the floor and finds an immense nugget.  Her father rushes in to see it.  Two miners also see it and try to raise it.  They are promptly seen and called by MAY, who shoots one and holds the pistol pointed at the other, while the curtain slowly falls.)

ACT III.—­Scene, a London drawing-room.  Enter MAY, gorgeously dressed.  Also her father, who has forgotten all about his wife, and also LIONEL and the COMIC YANKEE.

COMIC YANKEE.  “Let us sing.”

MAY.  “Come on, old hoss.” (They sing and dance for an hour, such being the pleasant custom of fashionable London society.)

MAY.  “Miss CLARA!  I understand you are engaged to marry LIONEL, and that if you marry anybody else you lose your dower of twenty thousand pounds.  Sell LIONEL to me, and I will give you a check for the amount.”

CLARA.  “Thanks, noble stranger, there is the receipt.  Hand over the money.”

LIONEL.  “Dearest MAY, as you must have a pretty large bank account, to be able to draw checks for twenty thousand pounds, I am quite sure I love you.”

MAY.  “Come to my arms.  Now then, everybody, how is that for high!” (Slow curtain, relieved by eccentric gymnastics by the COMIC YANKEE.)

BOY IN THE AUDIENCE.  “Pa! isn’t that splendid?”

DISCRIMINATING PARENT.  “What!  How!  Who!  Where am I?  O, to be sure, I came to see Heart’s Ease, and to take my evening nap.  Did LOTTA play the banjo?”

BOY.  “O didn’t she just.  She played and sung dead loads of times.”

DISCRIMINATING PARENT.  “I have had a sweet nap.  My son, I think I can now risk taking you to the minstrels.  If I slept through this, I could feel reasonably sure of sleeping through even the dark conundrums and sentimental colored ballads.  There is only a shade of difference between the two styles of performance, and that slight shade is only burnt cork.”

MATADOR.

* * * * *

Mural Decorations in Rome.