Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope’s Company was not the only combination that offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December Saturday night.  The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his “Surprise Party”—­he sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended from the hills—­had been advertising “Side-splitting begins at 9:30.  Prices as usual,” with reference to this particular evening for a fortnight.  In the Athenian Theatre—­it had a tin roof, and nobody could hear the orchestra when it rained—­the Midgets were presenting the earlier collaborations of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed under nine years of age.  Colonel Pike’s Great Occidental Circus had been in full blast on the Maidan for a week.  It became a great occidental circus when Colonel Pike married the proprietress.  They were both staying at the Grand Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a relict through cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do with, to say nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office.  And certainly circumstances justified the lady’s complaisance, for while hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in the excusably imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural feature of the cold weather.  There was the mystic bower, too, in an octagonal tent under a pipal tree, which gave you, by an arrangement of looking-glasses, the most unaccountable sensations for one rupee; and a signboard cried “Know Thyself!” where a physiological display lurked from the eyes of the police behind a perfectly respectable skeleton at one end of Peri Chandra’s Gully.  Llewellyn Stanhope saw that there was competition, sighed to think how much, as he stood in the foggy vestibule of the Imperial Theatre wrapped in the impressive folds of his managerial cape, and pulled his moustache and watched the occasional carriage that rolled his way up the narrow lane from Chowringhee.  He thought bitterly, standing there, of Calcutta’s recognition of the claims of legitimate drama, for the dank darkness was full of the noise of wheels and the flashing of lamps on the way to accord another season’s welcome to Jimmy Finnigan.  “I might’ve learned this town well enough by now,” he reflected, “to know that a bally minstrel show’s about the size of it.”  Mr. Stanhope had not Mr. Finnigan’s art of the large red lips and the twanging banjo; his thought was scornful rather than envious.  He aspired, moreover, to be known as the pilot of stars, at least in the incipience of their courses, to be taken seriously by association, since nature had arranged that he never could be on his intrinsic merits.  His upper lip was too short for that, his yellow moustache too curly, while the perpetual bullying he underwent at the hands of leading ladies gave him an air of deference to everybody else which was sometimes painfully misunderstood.  The stars, it must be said regretfully, in connection with so laudable an ambition, nearly always betrayed