“My dear Fussie gave me a terrible shock on Sunday night.  When we got in, J——­, Hatton, and I dined at the Cafe Royal.  I told Walter to bring Fussie there.  He did, and Fussie burst into the room while the waiter was cutting some mutton, when, what d’ye think—­one bound at me—­another instantaneous bound at the mutton, and from the mutton nothing would get him until he’d got his plateful.

     “Oh, what a surprise it was indeed!  He never now will leave my
     side, my legs, or my presence, but I cannot but think, alas, of
     that seductive piece of mutton!”

Poor Fussie!  He met his death through the same weakness.  It was at Manchester, I think.  A carpenter had thrown down his coat with a ham sandwich in the pocket, over an open trap on the stage.  Fussie, nosing and nudging after the sandwich, fell through and was killed instantly.  When they brought up the dog after the performance, every man took his hat off....  Henry was not told until the end of the play.

He took it so very quietly that I was frightened, and said to his son Laurence who was on that tour: 

“Do let’s go to his hotel and see how he is.”

We drove there and found him sitting eating his supper with the poor dead Fussie, who would never eat supper any more, curled up in his rug on the sofa.  Henry was talking to the dog exactly as if it were alive.  The next day he took Fussie back in the train with him to London, covered with a coat.  He is buried in the dogs’ cemetery, Hyde Park.

His death made an enormous difference to Henry.  Fussie was his constant companion.  When he died, Henry was really alone.  He never spoke of what he felt about it, but it was easy to know.

We used to get hints how to get this and that from watching Fussie!  His look, his way of walking!  He sang, whispered eloquently and low—­then barked suddenly and whispered again!  Such a lesson in the law of contrasts!

The first time that Henry went to the Lyceum after Fussie’s death, every one was anxious and distressed, knowing how he would miss the dog in his dressing-room.  Then an odd thing happened.  The wardrobe cat, who had never been near the room in Fussie’s lifetime, came down and sat on Fussie’s cushion!  No one knew how the “Governor” would take it.  But when Walter was sent out to buy some meat for it, we saw that Henry was not going to resent it!  From that night onwards the cat always sat night after night in the same place, and Henry liked its companionship.  In 1902, when he left the theater for good, he wrote to me: 

     “The place is now given up to the rats—­all light cut off, and only
     Barry[1] and a foreman left.  Everything of mine I’ve moved away,
     including the Cat!”

[Footnote 1:  The stage-door keeper.]