or pass to some portion of his duty which he happens to bear in recollection.  “What’s the use of bothering about a handful of words?” demanded a veteran stroller.  “I never stick.  I always say something and get on, and no one has hissed me yet!” It was probably this performer, who, during his impersonation of Macbeth, finding himself at a loss as to the text soon after the commencement of his second scene with Lady Macbeth, coolly observed:  “Let us retire, dearest chuck, and con this matter over in a more sequestered spot, far from the busy haunts of men.  Here the walls and doors are spies, and our every word is echoed far and near.  Come, then, let’s away!  False heart must hide, you know, what false heart dare not show.”  A prompter could be of little service to a gentleman so fertile in resources.  He may be left to pair off with that provincial Montano who modernised his speech in reference to Cassio: 

    And ’tis great pity that the noble Moor
    Should hazard such a place as his own second
    With one of an ingraft infirmity. 
    It were an honest action to say
    So to the Moor—­

into “It’s a pity, don’t you think, that Othello should place such a man in such an office.  Hadn’t we better tell him so, sir?”

In small provincial or strolling companies it often becomes expedient to press every member of the establishment into the service of the stage.  We read of a useful property-man and scene-shifter who was occasionally required to fill small parts in the performance, such, for instance, as “the cream-faced loon” in “Macbeth,” and who thus explained his system of representation, admitting that from his other occupations he could rarely commit perfectly to memory the words he was required to utter.  “I tell you how I manage.  I inwariably contrives to get a reg’lar knowledge of the natur’ of the char-ac-ter, and ginnerally gives the haudience words as near like the truth as need be.  I seldom or never puts any of you out, and takes as much pains as anybody can expect for two-and-six a week extra, which is all I gets for doing such-like parts as mine.  I finds Shakespeare’s parts worse to get into my head nor any other; he goes in and out so to tell a thing.  I should like to know how I was to say all that rigmarole about the wood coming; and I’m sure my telling Macbeth as Birnam Wood was a-walking three miles off the castle, did very well.  But some gentlemen is sadly pertickler, and never considers circumstances!”

Such players as this provoke the despair of prompters, who must often be tempted to close their books altogether.  It would almost seem that there are some performers whom it is quite vain to prompt:  it is safer to let them alone, doing what they list, lest bad should be made worse.  Something of this kind happened once in the case of a certain Marcellus.  Hamlet demands of Horatio concerning the ghost of “buried Denmark:”  “Stayed it long?” Horatio answers:  “While one with moderate