ry one in order. For
all he had useful suggestions, and the dullest of clays under his
potter's hand were transformed into little bits of porcelain. He
adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised
playbills, wrote out calls, and enforced as well as exhibited in his
proper person everything of which he urged the necessity on others. Such
a chaos of dirt, confusion, and noise, as the little theatre was the day
we entered it, and such a cosmos as he made it of cleanliness, order,
and silence, before the rehearsals were over! There were only two
things left as we found them, bits of humanity both, understood from
the first as among the fixtures of the place: a Man in a Straw Hat,
tall, and very fitful in his exits and entrances, of whom we never could
pierce the mystery, whether he was on guard or in possession, or what he
was; and a solitary little girl, who flitted about so silently among our
actors and actresses that she might have been deaf and dumb but for
sudden small shrieks and starts elicited by the wonders going on, which
obtained for her the name of Fireworks. There is such humorous allusion
to both in a letter of Dickens's of a year's later date, on the occasion
of the straw-hatted mystery revealing itself as a gentleman in training
for the tragic stage, that it may pleasantly close for the present our
private theatricals.

"OUR STRAW-HATTED FRIEND from Miss Kelly's! Oh my stars! To think of
him, all that time--Macbeth in disguise; Richard the Third grown
straight; Hamlet as he appeared on his seavoyage to England. What an
artful villain he must be, never to have made any sign of the melodrama
that was in him! What a wicked-minded and remorseless Iago to have seen
you doing Kitely night after night! raging to murder you and seize the
part! Oh fancy Miss Kelly 'getting him up' in Macbeth. Good Heaven! what
a mass of absurdity must be shut up sometimes within the walls of that
small theatre in Dean-street! FIREWORKS will come out shortly, depend
upon it, in the dumb line; and will relate her history in profoundly
unintelligible motions that will be translated into long and complicated
descriptions by a grey-headed father, and a red-wigged countryman, his
son. You remember the dumb dodge of relating an escape from captivity?
Clasping the left wrist with the right hand, and the right wrist with
the left hand--alternately (to express chains)--and then going round and
round the stage very fast, and