To return to the Diplomatic Theatricals at Petrograd, Labiche’s piece, La Cagnotte, is extraordinarily funny, though written over sixty years ago.  We gave a very successful performance of this, in which I played the restaurant waiter—­a capital part.  La Lettre Chargee and Le Sous-Prefet are both most amusing pieces, which can be played, with very slight “cuts,” before any audience, and they both bubble over with that gaiete francaise which appeals so to me.  We were coached at Petrograd by Andrieux, the jeune premier of the Theatre Michel, and we all became very professional indeed, never talking of Au Seconde Acte, but saying Au Deux, in proper French stage style.  We also endeavoured to cultivate the long-drawn-out “a’s” of the Comedie Francaise, and pronounced “adorahtion” and “imaginahtion” in the traditional manner of the “Maison de Moliere.”

The British business community in Petrograd were also extremely fond of getting up theatricals, in this case, of course, in English.  If in the French plays I was invariably cast for old men, in the English ones I was always allotted the extremely juvenile parts, being still very slim and able to “make up” young.  I must confess to having appeared on the stage in an Eton jacket and collar at the age of twenty-four, as the schoolboy in Peril.

Russians are extremely clever at parody.  Two brothers Narishkin wrote an intensely amusing mock serious opera, entitled Gargouillada, ou la Belle de Venise.  It was written half in French and mock-Italian, and half in Russian, and was an excellent skit on an old-fashioned Italian opera.  All the ladies fought shy of the part of “Countess Gorganzola,” the heroine’s grandmother.  This was partly due to the boldness of some of “Gorganzola’s” lines, and also to the fact that whoever played the role would have to make-up frankly as an old woman.  I was asked to take “Countess Gorganzola” instead of the villain of the piece, which I had rehearsed, and I did so, turning it into a sort of Charley’s Aunt part.  Garouillada went with a roar from the opening chorus to the final tableau, and so persistently enthusiastic were the audience that we agreed to give the opera again four nights in succession.

I was at work in the Chancery of the Embassy next morning when three people were ushered in to me.  They were a family from either St. Helens, Runcorn, or Widnes, I forget which, all speaking the broadest Lancashire.  The navigation of the Neva being again opened, they had come on a little trip to Russia on a tramp-steamer belonging to a friend of theirs.  There was the father, a short, thickset man in shiny black broadcloth, with a shaven upper lip, and a voluminous red “Newgate-frill” framing his face—­ exactly the type of face one associates with the Deacon of a Calvinistic-Methodist Chapel; there was the mother, a very grim-looking female; and the son, a nondescript hobbledehoy with goggle-eyes.  It appeared that after their passports had been inspected on landing,