they don't think
anything of the Press. It is no good writing to the acting manager,
because there is no acting manager. It would be a waste of time offering
to exhibit bills, because they don't have any bills--not of that sort.
If you want to go in to see the show, you've got to pay. If you don't
pay, you stop outside; that's their brutal rule."

"Dear me," I said, "what a very unpleasant arrangement! And whereabouts
is this extraordinary theatre? I don't think I can ever have been inside
it."

"I don't think you have," he replied; "it is at Ober-Ammergau--first
turning on the left after you leave Ober railway-station, fifty miles
from Munich."

"Um! rather out of the way for a theatre," I said. "I should not have
thought an outlying house like that could have afforded to give itself
airs."

"The house holds seven thousand people," answered my friend B., "and
money is turned away at each performance. The first production is on
Monday next. Will you come?"

I pondered for a moment, looked at my diary, and saw that Aunt Emma was
coming to spend Saturday to Wednesday next with us, calculated that if I
went I should miss her, and might not see her again for years, and
decided that I would go.

To tell the truth, it was the journey more than the play that tempted me.
To be a great traveller has always been one of my cherished ambitions. I
yearn to be able to write in this sort of strain:--

"I have smoked my fragrant Havana in the sunny streets of old Madrid, and
I have puffed the rude and not sweet-smelling calumet of peace in the
draughty wigwam of the Wild West; I have sipped my evening coffee in the
silent tent, while the tethered camel browsed without upon the desert
grass, and I have quaffed the fiery brandy of the North while the
reindeer munched his fodder beside me in the hut, and the pale light of
the midnight sun threw the shadows of the pines across the snow; I have
felt the stab of lustrous eyes that, ghostlike, looked at me from out
veil-covered faces in Byzantium's narrow ways, and I have laughed back
(though it was wrong of me to do so) at the saucy, wanton glances of the
black-eyed girls of Jedo; I have wandered where 'good'--but not too
good--Haroun Alraschid crept disguised at nightfall, with his faithful
Mesrour by his side; I have stood upon the bridge where Dante watched the
sainted Beatrice pass by; I have floated on the waters that once bore the
barge of Cleopatra; I have stood wher