He began by buying real pigs, real sheep, a real goat, and a real dog. Real litter was strewn all over the stage, much to the inconvenience of the unreal farm-laborer, Charles Kelly, who could not compete with it, although he looked as like a farmer as any actor could.  They all looked their parts better than the real wall which ran across the stage, piteously naked of real shadows, owing to the absence of the real sun, and, of course, deficient in the painted shadows which make a painted wall look so like the real thing.

Never, never can I forget Charles Reade’s arrival at the theater in a four-wheeler with a goat and a lot of little pigs.  When the cab drew up at the stage-door, the goat seemed to say, as plainly as any goat could:  “I’m dashed if I stay in this cab any longer with these pigs!” and while Charles Reade was trying to pacify it, the piggies escaped!  Unfortunately, they didn’t all go in the same direction, and poor dear Charles Reade had a “divided duty.”  There was the goat, too, in a nasty mood.  Oh, his serious face, as he decided to leave the goat and run for the pigs, with his loose trousers, each one a yard wide at least, flapping in the wind!

“That’s a relief, at any rate,” said Charles Kelly, who was watching the flight of the pigs.  “I sha’n’t have those d——­d pigs to spoil my acting as well as the d——­d dog and the d——­d goat!”

How we all laughed when Charles Reade returned from the pig-hunt to rehearsal with the brief direction to the stage manager that the pigs would be “cut out.”

The reason for the real wall was made more evident when the real goat was tied up to it.  A painted wall would never have stood such a strain.

On the first night, the real dog bit Kelly’s real ankles, and in real anger he kicked the real animal by a real mistake into the orchestra’s real drum.

So much for realism as practiced by Charles Reade!  There was still something to remind him of the experiment in Rachael, the circus goat.  Rachael—­he was no she, but what of that?—­was given the free run of the garden of Reade’s house at Knightsbridge.  He had everything that any normal goat could desire—­a rustic stable, a green lawn, the best of food.  Yet Rachael pined and grew thinner and thinner.  One night when we were all sitting at dinner, with the French windows open onto the lawn because it was a hot night, Rachael came prancing into the room, looking happy, lively, and quite at home.  All the time, while Charles Reade had been fashing himself to provide every sort of rural joy for his goat, the ungrateful beast had been longing for the naphtha lights of the circus, for lively conversation and the applause of the crowd.

You can’t force a goat any more than you can force a child to live the simple life.  “N’Yawk’s the place,” said the child of a Bowery tenement in New York, on the night of her return from an enforced sojourn in Arcady.  She hated picking daisies, and drinking rich new milk made her sick.  When the kind teacher who had brought her to the country strove to impress her by taking her to see a cow milked, she remarked witheringly to the man who was milking:  “Gee!  You put it in!”