Another little trait from a play of those far-past days illustrates the same point.  It was a drawing-room drama of the Scribe school.  Near the beginning of an act, some one spilt a bottle of red ink, and mopped it up with his (or her) handkerchief, leaving the handkerchief on the escritoire.  The act proceeded from scene to scene, and the handkerchief remained unnoticed; but every one in the audience who knew the rules of the game, kept his eye on the escritoire, and was certain that that ink had not been spilt for nothing.  In due course a situation of great intensity was reached, wherein the villain produced a pistol and fired at the heroine, who fainted.  As a matter of fact he had missed her; but her quick-witted friend seized the gory handkerchief, and, waving it in the air, persuaded the villain that the shot had taken deadly effect, and that he must flee for his life.  Even in those days, such an unblushing piece of trickery was found more comic than impressive.  It was a case of preparation “giving itself away.”

A somewhat later play, The Mummy and the Humming Bird, by Mr. Isaac Henderson, contains a good example of over-elaborate preparation.  The Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D’Orelli.  Remaining at home one evening, when Lady Lumley and a party of friends, including D’Orelli, have gone off to dine at a restaurant, the Earl chances to look out of the window, and observes an organ-grinder making doleful music in the snow.  His heart is touched, and he invites the music-monger to join him in his study and share his informal dinner.  The conversation between them is carried on by means of signs, for the organ-grinder knows no English, and the Earl is painfully and improbably ignorant of Italian.  He does not even know that Roma means Rome, and Londra, London.  This ignorance, however, is part of the author’s ingenuity.  It leads to the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home.  I need scarcely say that this villain is none other than D’Orelli; and when at last he and the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to convey to the Earl, by aid of a brandy-bottle, a siphon, a broken plate, and half-a-crown, not only the place of their destination, but the very hotel to which they are going.  This is a fair example of that ingenuity for ingenuity’s sake which was once thought the very essence of the playwright’s craft, but has long ago lost all attraction for intelligent audiences.