[Illustration:  HOW IT OUGHT TO HAVE ENDED.

Mr. Justice Butt pronounces a decree of divorce.  Phoebus marries
Esmeralda.  Claude Frollo is smashed, and Quasimodo is stabbed.]

The Goat, too, has a wretched part:  to be left out after the first scene is too bad.  Something might have been done with him, if he had only been put into a chaise; but perhaps Esmeralda and Phoebus reserve him for further use in the course of a couple of years or so, when Djali, drawing a goat-chaise containing a little Esmeralda and a little Phoebus, followed by a nurse and Papa and Mamma, would make a sensation at some fashionable seaside resort.

[Illustration:  The Goat.  “I ought to have the second principal part in this Opera.  If they don’t produce Dinorah, I shall give notice.  Too bad of Goring Thomas.  If I see him alone I’ll show him what ‘Butting’ Thomas is.”]

Mons. MONTARIOL played and sang well as Gringoire, and Mons. WINOGRADOFF was most artistic as Clopin, Amusing to see Mons. LASSALLE as Claude Frollo, melodramatically hiding behind the window-curtains, just as Phoebus enters the room followed by Esmeralda.  So evidently was the curtain shaken, that Phoebus would most certainly have detected the sneak, or he might have asked Esmeralda, “What’s that?” and have asserted his belief that it could not possibly be the cat, but he might have accepted her explanation had she informed him that it was the Goat.  What a chance here lost for a situation of the Goat behind curtains butting Claude Frollo!  However, it was all “purtendin’,” and JEAN DE RESZKE as Phoebus didn’t see what he would most certainly have noticed immediately had he been himself.  Magnificently got up; mise-en-scene excellent; band and chorus all that could be wished.

* * * * *

BULLY FOR THE COLONEL!

“The Hon. Member had availed himself of the privilege accorded to Members of Parliament in debate to fire a shameful barbed arrow at Colonel CADDELL, in order that some of the mud might stick.”—­Colonel Saunderson in the House of Commons.

  Come, listen to my story:  it’s a sort of shilling-shock tale,
  With no end of fire and fury, and a modicum of blood,
  And a Colonel who mixed metaphors as Yankees mix a cocktail,
  And a quiverful of arrows, shameful arrows, barbed with mud.

  It was DILLON who had used them, and he spoke of Tipperary,
  Tipperary new and rentless, where the tenants have combined. 
  And the Parnellites were gathered like the chicks of Mother CAREY,
  When they feel the tempest rising, and give warning of the wind.

  And the pale and angry Tories sat impatient of the battle. 
  And the benches of the Commons, where they love a fight, grew full;
  And, although they knew ’twas better not to hurry people’s cattle,
  They implored their fiery Colonel to oblige them with a bull.