oach-yard of the
George and Gate woke up from their usual expressionless stare at things
in general to notice a stranger who came along at a brisk rate, carrying
a small portmanteau, and looking sharply and with a quick penetrating
glance at them and the sign and the bar of the tap, where he called for
a glass of ale and inquired his way to the vicarage. He was a well-knit,
active man of about forty-five, with dark, glossy hair, just beginning
to gray; a dark, short moustache; shaven cheeks and chin, with a blue
tinge where the beard and whiskers would have been; and he wore
well-fitting but rather shabby clothes, which scarcely seemed to be in
keeping with the big (false or real) diamond ring on his right hand and
a huge breast-pin in his satin stock.

These were the remarks some of us made about him when he appeared on the
low platform at our penny reading the next evening, and was introduced
by the vicar as "My friend Mr. Walter De Montfort, a gentleman connected
with the dramatic profession in London, who has consented to favour us
with a reading and to contribute to our improvement as well as to our
entertainment."

A good many of us thought we had never heard reading, or rather
recitation, till that evening; there was such a keen, bright, intense
look in the man's face; such a rich, flexible, sonorous roll in his
voice; such a conscious appropriateness in his rather exaggerated
gestures, that when he commenced with what I have since learned was a
peculiarly stagey expression the poem of "King Robert of Sicily and the
Angel," and began to tell us how--

"King-ar-Rroberut of Sissurlee"

dreamed his wonderful dream, we were all eye and ear, and when he had
concluded people looked at each other and gasped.

Who was he?--an actor--a manager of a theatre--a great tragedian? How
did the vicar first know him? How long was he going to stay? What
theatre did he perform at? All these questions were asked among
ourselves, and to some of them we obtained answers at the next Dorcas
meeting, which was held at the vicarage. Mr. De Montfort was not a
regular actor now. He had been, but he now taught elocution and
deportment, and had been introduced to the vicar by a brother clergyman
in London much interested in the union of church and stage. His
credentials were undoubted, but it was feared he was poor. Of his
ability everybody spoke highly, and he was so accomplished that the
vicar had invited him to stay for sev