“There’s plenty more if you want it,” he said dryly.

He had had some raw silk dyed the exact saffron.  He had had two blocks made, one red and the other black, and the design had been printed, and a few cheap spangles had been added to replace the real jewels.  My toga looked beautiful.

This was but one of the many emergencies to which Arnott rose with talent and promptitude.

With the staff of the theater he was a bit of a bully—­one of those men not easily roused, but being vexed, “nasty in the extreme!” As a craftsman he had wonderful taste, and could copy antique furniture so that one could not tell the copy from the original.

The great aim at the Lyceum was to get everything “rotten perfect,” as the theatrical slang has it, before the dress rehearsal.  Father’s test of being rotten perfect was not a bad one.  “If you can get out of bed in the middle of the night and do your part, you’re perfect.  If you can’t, you don’t really know it!”

Henry Irving applied some such test to every one concerned in the production.  I cannot remember any play at the Lyceum which did not begin punctually and end at the advertised time, except “Olivia,” when some unwise changes in the last act led to delay.

He never hesitated to discard scenery if it did not suit his purpose.  There was enough scenery rejected in “Faust” to have furnished three productions, and what was finally used for the famous Brocken scene cost next to nothing.

Even the best scene-painters sometimes think more of their pictures than of scenic effects.  Henry would never accept anything that was not right theatrically as well as pictorially beautiful.  His instinct in this was unerring and incomparable.

I remember that at one scene-rehearsal every one was fatuously pleased with the scenery.  Henry sat in the stalls talking about everything but the scenery.  It was hard to tell what he thought.

“Well, are you ready?” he asked at last.

“Yes, sir.”

“My God!  Is that what you think I am going to give the public?”

Never shall I forget the astonishment of stage manager, scene-painter, and staff!  It was never safe to indulge in too much self-satisfaction beforehand with Henry.  He was always liable to drop such bombs!

He believed very much in “front” scenes, seeing how necessary they were to the swift progress of Shakespeare’s diverging plots.  These cloths were sometimes so wonderfully painted and lighted that they constituted scenes of remarkable beauty.  The best of all were the Apothecary scene in “Romeo and Juliet” and the exterior of Aufidius’s house in “Coriolanus.”

We never had electricity installed at the Lyceum until Daly took the theater.  When I saw the effect on the faces of the electric footlights, I entreated Henry to have the gas restored, and he did.  We used gas footlights and gas limes there until we left the theater for good in 1902.