ce of jugglery. Of course I will admit you have to
swallow the robust assumption that into a household over which the
shadow of death in its ugliest form hovers so threateningly two fatuous
people, to wit the scientist and his wife, can come and babble about
their own trivial domestic troubles or their latest philosophy of life.
But then mystery plays always are like that, and this is a jolly good
one of its kind--a kind which it pains me, as a superior person, to
confess that I liked enormously.

[Illustration: THE MEDIUM AND THE PALMIST.

_Beverley_ ... Mr. H. B. Irving.

_Sir Everard Marshall_ ... Mr. Holman Clark.]

Mr. H. B. IRVING as the preposterous _Beverley_ was in his very best
form. _Beverley_ is really a creation. How much the author's and how
much the player's it would be an impertinence to inquire. This
imperturbable trickster with his thin streak of genuine sensitiveness to
psychic influence; his grotesquely florid style--the man certainly has
style; his frank reliance on apt alcohol's artful aid; his cadging
epicureanism; his keen eye for supplementary data for his inductions and
prophecies; his cynical candour when detected, is presented to us with
Mr. IRVING'S rich-flavoured and most whimsical sense of comedy, with all
his exuberant abundance of gracious or fantastic gesture and resourceful
business. In the trances, sometimes real, sometimes simulated, he gives
you a plausible sketch of how a modicum of psychic power (whatever that
may be), laced with whisky neat, might colour a seance. Mr. _Hackett_,
by way of showing that he has not ignored the literature of his subject,
has adapted from the admirable, but, I regret to say, entirely
untrustworthy, because incurably original, MAETERLINCK an entirely new
definition of psychometry. But we certainly will not go into that.

Mr. HOLMAN CLARK as the sceptical _Sir Everard_, completely spoofed by
_Beverley_ in the end, with an elaborate make-up ruthlessly reminding us
of our simian ancestry, potters cleverly about the stage with that
admirable and amiable craft which he has at such easy command. Miss
MARIE ILLINGTON as _Lady Marshall_, the seeker after light, kept the
burlesquerie of her part skilfully within bounds--indeed this matter of
key was extraordinarily well handled by the three players entrusted with
what I have ventured to call the cork _motif_.

As to the more serious business, Mr. H. V. ESMOND seemed to behave very
much as one would imagin