“I play Lady Macbeth!” cried I, “with my scrubbing-brush of a beard, and whiskers like a prickly-pear hedge; why, you mast be all mad to think of such a thing.”

“My dear friend,” remarked Gahagan mildly, “you know I have always said that you had the Kemble eye and nose, and I’m sure you won’t hesitate about cutting off your whiskers when so much depends upon it; they’ll soon grow again you know, Peter; as for your dark chin that don’t matter a rush, as Lady Macbeth is a dark woman.”

The reader will agree with me in thinking that friendship can sometimes be as blind as love, when I say with respect to my “Kemble eye and nose,” that the former has been from childhood affected with a decided tendency to strabismus, and the latter bears a considerably stronger resemblance to a pump-handle than it does to the classic profile of John Kemble or any of his family.

“Lieutenant Gahagan,” said I, solemnly, “do you remember how, some six years ago at Hydrabad, when yet beardless and whiskerless, the only hair upon my face being eyebrows and eyelashes, at your instigation and ‘suadente diabolo,’ I attempted to perform Lydia Languish in ‘The Rivals?’ and hast thou yet forgotten, O son of an unsainted father, how my grenadier stride, the fixed tea-pot position of my arms, to say nothing of the numerous other solecisms in the code of female manners which I perpetrated on that occasion, made me a laughing-stock and a by-word for many a long day afterwards!  All this, I say, must be fresh in your recollection, and yet you have the audacity to ask me to expose myself again in a similar manner.”

“Pooh, pooh!” laughed Gahagan, “you were only a boy then, now you have more experience in these matters; besides, Lydia Languish was a part quite unworthy of your powers; Lady Macbeth is a horse of another colour.”

“Why, man, with what face could I aver that

  ’I have given suck, and know
  How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me.’

That would certainly draw tears from the audience, but they would be tears of laughter, not sympathy, I warrant you.  No, no, good master Fred, it won’t do, I tell you; and in the words of Lady Macbeth herself, I say—­

  ’What beast was’t, then,
  That made you break this enterprise to me?’

And now oblige me by walking your body off, for I have got my yesterday’s guard report to fill up and send in, in default of which I shall be sure to catch an ‘official’ from the Brigade-Major.”

But Fred not only did not walk his body off, but harping on the same string, pertinaciously continued to ply me with alternate arguments and intreaties, until at last fairly wearied out, and more, I believe, with the hope of getting rid of the “importunate chink” of the fellow’s discourse, than anything else, in an evil moment I consented! hear it not, shade of Mrs. Siddons! to denude myself of the bushy honours of my cheeks, and tread the boards of the Bangalore stage as the wife of that atrocious usurper “King Cawdor Glamis!”