gs to say, but it is the astonishing finish and precision of their
technique which make their work so pleasant to watch. If it throws into
awkward relief the amateurishness of some of their associates that can't
be helped. Miss VERA GORDON'S _Rosie_ is a good performance, and Miss
JULIA BRUNS, the vampire, seemed to me to make with considerable skill
and subtlety a real character (within the limits allowed by the farcical
nature of the scheme) out of what might easily have been uninvitingly
crude.

T.

* * * * *

OUR FRIEND THE FISH.

"What is a sardine?" was a question much before the Courts some few
years ago, not unprofitably for certain gentlemen wearing silk, and
the correct solution I never heard; but I can supply, from personal
observation, one answer to the query, and that is, "An essential
ingredient in London humour." For without this small but sapid
fish--whatever he may really be, whether denizen of the Sardinian sea,
immature Cornish pilchard, or mere plebeian sprat well oiled--numbers of
our fellow-men and fellow-women, with all the will in the world, might
never raise a laugh. As it is, thanks to his habit of lying in excessive
compression within his tin tabernacle, and the prevalence in these
congested days of too many passengers on the Tubes, on the Underground
and in the omnibuses, whoever would publicly remove gravity has but to
set up the sardine comparison and be rewarded.

Why creatures so remote from man as fishes--cold-blooded inhabitants of
an element in which man exists only so long as he keeps on the surface;
mute, incredible and incapable of exchanging any intercourse with
him--why these should provide the Cockney, the dweller in the citiest
City of the world, with so much of the material of jocoseness is an
odd problem. But they do. Herrings, when cured either by smoke or sun,
notoriously contribute to the low comedian's success. The mere word
"kipper" has every girl in the gallery in a tittering ecstasy. But
outside the Halls it is the sardine that conquers.

In one day this week I witnessed the triumph of the sardine on three
different occasions, and it was always hearty and complete.

The first time was in a lift at Chancery Lane. It is not normally a very
busy station, but our attendant having, as is now the rule, talked too
long with the attendant of a neighbouring lift, we were more than full
before the descent began. We were also cross and impati