“Dear Nellie,—­

“I bundled through my part somehow last night, a disgraceful performance, and no waist-padding!  Oh, what an impudent wretch you must think me to attempt such a part!  I pinched my arm once or twice last night to see if it was really me.  It was so sweet of you to write me such a nice letter, and then a telegram, too!

“Yours ever, dear Nell,

“LILLIE.

“P.S.—­I am rehearsing, all day—­’The Honeymoon’ next week.  I love the hard work, and the thinking and study.”

Just at this time there was a great dearth on the stage of people with lovely diction, and Lillie Langtry had it.  I can imagine that she spoke Rosalind’s lines beautifully, and that her clear gray eyes and frank manner, too well-bred to be hoydenish, must have been of great value.

To go back to “Olivia.”  Like all Hare’s plays, it was perfectly cast.  Where all were good, it will be admitted, I think, by every one who saw the production, that Terriss was the best.  “As you stand there, whipping your boot, you look the very picture of vain indifference,” Olivia says to Squire Thornhill in the first act, and never did I say it without thinking how absolutely to the life Terriss realized that description!

As I look back, I remember no figure in the theater more remarkable than Terriss.  He was one of those heaven-born actors who, like kings by divine right, can, up to a certain point, do no wrong.  Very often, like Dr. Johnson’s “inspired idiot,” Mrs. Pritchard, he did not know what he was talking about.  Yet he “got there,” while many cleverer men stayed behind.  He had unbounded impudence, yet so much charm that no one could ever be angry with him.  Sometimes he reminded me of a butcher-boy flashing past, whistling, on the high seat of his cart, or of Phaethon driving the chariot of the sun—­pretty much the same thing, I imagine!  When he was “dressed up” Terriss was spoiled by fine feathers; when he was in rough clothes, he looked a prince.

He always commanded the love of his intimates as well as that of the outside public.  To the end he was “Sailor Bill”—­a sort of grown-up midshipmite, whose weaknesses provoked no more condemnation than the weaknesses of a child.  In the theater he had the tidy habits of a sailor.  He folded up his clothes and kept them in beautiful condition; and of a young man who had proposed for his daughter’s hand he said:  “The man’s a blackguard!  Why, he throws his things all over the room!  The most untidy chap I ever saw!”

Terriss had had every sort of adventure by land and sea before I acted with him at the Court.  He had been midshipman, tea-planter, engineer, sheep-farmer, and horse-breeder.  He had, to use his own words, “hobnobbed with every kind of queer folk, and found myself in extremely queer predicaments.”  The adventurous, dare-devil spirit of the roamer, the incarnate gipsy, always looked out of his insolent eyes.  Yet, audacious as he seemed, no man was ever more nervous on the stage.  On a first night he was shaking all over with fright, in spite of his confident and dashing appearance.