stage directions with just the right modulation of voice. All is quite satisfactory until—say on page 9—he comes to a "point" on which he relies for a hearty laugh. He makes his point, and dwells for a moment upon it. Nobody notices it except the stage-manager, who thinks he has paused because he is hoarse, and kindly pours him out a glass of water. Much abashed at this, Facile pounds through the rest of the manuscript at an astounding pace—hurrying intentionally over all the "good things" as if he were ashamed of them—which, for the moment, he is—and slurring over stirring passages as if they were merely incidental to the general purpose of the scene—as though, in fact, the scene had not been originally constructed in order to introduce them. As he approaches the end of the second act, he becomes quite unconscious of the fact he is reading at all until recalled by an enforced pause occasioned by the accident of a misplaced leaf, or the opening or shutting of the green-room door. As he commences the third act, he finds himself wandering into falsetto every now and then; he becomes husky and out of tune; he takes a copious drink of water, and the words immediately begin to babble into each other in a manner altogether incomprehensible. He falls into his old habit of slurring over important passages, but endeavours to compensate for this by laying such exceptional stress upon sentences of no ultimate importance, that his audience begin to wish they had paid more attention to the earlier passages of the play, that they might understand more clearly the force of the old clergyman's remark about the weather, or the subtlety of the ex-harlequin's invi-
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A Stage Play.
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