the manifest gravity of its bearing upon their interests and future happiness notwithstanding.  Moreover, we who are among the spectators are bound to credit this curious auricular infirmity on the part of the lover and the lady.  We can of course hear perfectly well the speech of their playfellow, and are thoroughly aware that from their position they must of necessity hear it at least as distinctly as we do.  Yet it is incumbent upon us to ignore our convictions and perceptions on this head.  For, indeed, the drama depends for its due existence and conduct upon a system of connivance and conspiracy, in which the audience, no less than the actors, are comprehended.  The makeshifts and artifices of the theatre have to be met half-way, and indulgently accepted.

The stage could not live without its whispers, which, after all, are only whispers in a non-natural sense.  For that can hardly be in truth a whisper, which is designed to reach the ears of some hundreds of persons.  But the “asides” of the theatre are a convenient and indispensable method of revealing to the audience the state of mind of the speaker, and of admitting them to his confidence.  The novelist can stop his story, and indulge in analytical descriptions of his characters, their emotions, moods, intentions, and opinions; but the dramatist can only make his creatures intelligible by means of the speeches he puts into their mouths.  So, for the information of the audience and the carrying on of the business of the scene, we have soliloquies and asides, the artful delivery of which, duly to secure attention and enlist sympathy, evokes the best abilities of the player, bound to invest with an air of nature and truth-seeming purely fictitious and unreasonable proceedings.

But there are other than these recognised and established whispers of the stage.  Voices are occasionally audible in the theatre which obviously were never intended to reach the public ear.  The existence of such a functionary as the prompter may be one of those things which are “generally known;” but the knowledge should not come, to those who sit in front of the curtain, from any exercise of their organs of sight or of sound.  To do the prompter justice, he is rarely visible; but his tones, however still and small they may pretend to be, sometimes travel to those whom they do not really concern.  One of the first scraps of information acquired by the theatrical student relates to the meaning of the letters P.S. and O.P.  Otherwise he might, perhaps, have some difficulty in comprehending the apparently magnetic attraction which one particular side of the proscenium has for so many of our players.  We say our players advisedly, for the position of the prompter is different on the foreign stage.  Abroad, and, indeed, during alien and lyrical performances in this country, he is hidden in a sort of gipsy-tent in front of the desk of the conductor.  The accommodation provided for him is limited enough; little more than