tana cake, with plenty of plums in it!—I learnt much of the greatest interest. Dress is a very important matter with Miss Terry. She, with Mrs. Comyns Carr, designs her own costumes. Miss Terry thinks—and rightly too—that a dress should do much to indicate the character of the woman who is wearing it, as witness the dress she wears as Lady Macbeth, which looks like a coiling snake. "I could have gone mad," she said, "as Ophelia, much more comfortably in black than in white. But, oh! the little ins and outs of which the public know nothing. Hamlet and Othello must be black, then Ophelia and Desdemona must be white." Then on the question of studying a part. Any school-girl can learn the words of a part, but that is a very different thing to knowing and growing up, as it were, with the character you are called upon to conceive and create. To study means to know, to know means to be. I saw one of her books. Its leaves were interspersed with almost as many notes as there was type—notes on the character of the woman, period, costume, surroundings, influences. One little note reads: "Character—Undemonstrative—Singing voice—About twenty-five;—She ought to be nice-looking, for the King of France took her without any dower; every servant in the Court loves her—indeed, the Court Fool pines away when she goes to France." Some half-dozen books, all for the same character, are full of notes of this kind. She loves Beatrice and Ophelia the best, and the shortest and smallest part she ever played was only a year or two ago, when she went on at an amateur performance, and the applause which greeted her would scarcely allow her to give her one and only line: "Please, ma'am, are you hin or are you hout?"
