as artists, struck me as eminently unsatisfactory.  They couldn’t move their arms or legs, and they had such stolid, uninteresting faces.  I don’t know how it first occurred to me to turn them all off, and fill their places with my mice.  Mercedes, of course, was leading lady; Monsieur and Madame Denis were the heavy parents; and a gentlemanlike young mouse named Leander was jeune premier.  Then, in my leisure, they used to act the most tremendous plays.  I was stage-manager, prompter, playwright, chorus, and audience, placing the theatre before a looking-glass, so that, though my duties kept me behind, I could peer round the edge, and watch the spectacle as from the front.  I would invent the lines and deliver them, but, that my illusion might be the more complete, I would change my voice for each personage.  The lines tried hard to be verses; no doubt they were vers libres.  At any rate, they were mouth-filling and sonorous.  The first play we attempted, I need hardly say, was Le Comte de Monte Cristo, such version of it as I could reconstruct from memory.  That had rather a long run.  Then I dramatised Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, Paul et Virginie, Quentin Durward, and La Dame de Monsoreau.  Mercedes made a charming Diane, Leander a brilliant and dashing Bussy; Monsieur Denis was cast for the role of Frere Gorenflot; and a long, thin, cadaverous-looking mouse, Don Quichotte by name, somewhat inadequately represented Chicot.  We began, as you see, with melodrama; presently we descended to light comedy, playing Les Memoires d’un Ane, Jean qui rit, and other works of the immortal Madame de Segur.  And then at last we turned a new leaf, and became naturalistic.  We had never heard of the naturalist school, though Monsieur Zola had already published some volumes of the Rougon-Macquart; but ideas are in the air; and we, for ourselves, discovered the possibilities of naturalism simultaneously, as it were, with the acknowledged apostle of that form of art.  We would impersonate the characters of our own world—­our schoolfellows and masters, our parents, servants, friends—­and carry them through experiences and situations derived from our impressions of real life.  Perhaps we rather led them a dance; and I daresay those we didn’t like came in for a good deal of retributive justice.  It was a little universe, of which we were the arch-arbiters, our will the final law.

I don’t know whether all children lack humour; but I’m sure no grown-up author-manager can take his business more seriously than I took mine.  Oh, I enjoyed it hugely; the hours I spent at it were enraptured hours; but it was grim, grim earnest.  After a while I began to long for a less subjective public, a more various audience.  I would summon the servants, range them in chairs at one end of the room, conceal myself behind the theatre, and spout the play with fervid solemnity.  And they would giggle, and make flippant commentaries, and at my