tart, or go out by yourself."

Besides, my sense of justice is outraged. Why should the short brother
be banged and thumped without reason? The Greek dramatist would have
explained to us that the shorter brother had committed a crime against
the gods. Aristophanes would have made the longer brother the instrument
of the Furies. The riddles he asked would have had bearing upon the
shorter brother's sin. In this way the spectator would have enjoyed
amusement combined with the satisfactory sense that Nemesis is ever
present in human affairs. I present the idea, for what it may be worth,
to the concoctors of knockabout turns.

Where Brotherly (and Sisterly) Love reigns supreme.

The family tie is always strong on the music-hall stage. The acrobatic
troupe is always a "Family": Pa, Ma, eight brothers and sisters, and the
baby. A more affectionate family one rarely sees. Pa and Ma are a
trifle stout, but still active. Baby, dear little fellow, is full of
humour. Ladies do not care to go on the music-hall stage unless they can
take their sister with them. I have seen a performance given by eleven
sisters, all the same size and apparently all the same age. She must
have been a wonderful woman--the mother. They all had golden hair, and
all wore precisely similar frocks--a charming but _decolletee_
arrangement--in claret-coloured velvet over blue silk stockings. So far
as I could gather, they all had the same young man. No doubt he found it
difficult amongst them to make up his mind.

"Arrange it among yourselves," he no doubt had said, "it is quite
immaterial to me. You are so much alike, it is impossible that a fellow
loving one should not love the lot of you. So long as I marry into the
family I really don't care."

When a performer appears alone on the music-hall stage it is easy to
understand why. His or her domestic life has been a failure. I listened
one evening to six songs in succession. The first two were sung by a
gentleman. He entered with his clothes hanging upon him in shreds. He
explained that he had just come from an argument with his wife. He
showed us the brick with which she had hit him, and the bump at the back
of his head that had resulted. The funny man's marriage is never a
success. But really this seems to be his own fault. "She was such a
lovely girl," he tells us, "with a face--well, you'd hardly call it a
face, it was more like a gas explosion. Then she had those wo