"You can write a play for _me_!" cried Hamlet. "Make it a farce-tragedy.
Take the modern player for your hero, and let _me_ play _him_. I'll bait
him through four acts. I'll imitate his walk. I'll cultivate his voice.
We'll have the first act a tank act, and drop the hero into the tank. The
second act can be in a saw-mill, and we can cut his hair off on a buzz-
saw. The third act can introduce a spile-driver with which to drive his
hat over his eyes and knock his brains down into his lungs. The fourth
act can be at Niagara Falls, and we'll send him over the falls; and for a
grand climax we can have him guillotined just after he has swallowed a
quart of prussic acid and a spoonful of powdered glass. Do that for me,
William, and you are forgiven. I'll play it for six hundred nights in
London, for two years in New York, and round up with a one-night stand in
Boston."

"It sounds like a good scheme," said Shakespeare, meditatively. "What
shall we call it?"

"Call it _Irving_," said Eugene Aram, who had entered. "I too have
suffered."

"And let me be Hamlet's understudy," said Charles the First, earnestly.

"Done!" said Shakespeare, calling for a pad and pencil.

And as the sun rose upon the Styx the next morning the Bard of Avon was
to be seen writing a comic chorus to be sung over the moribund tragedian
by the shades of Charles, Aram, and other eminent deceased heroes of the
stage, with which his new play of _Irving_ was to be brought to an
appropriate close.

This play has not as yet found its way upon the boards, but any
enterprising manager who desires to consider it may address

_Hamlet_,
_The House-Boat_,
_Hades-on-the-Styx_.

He is sure to get a reply by return mail, unless Mephistopheles
interferes, which is not unlikely, since Mephistopheles is said to have
been much pleased with the manner in which the eminent tragedian has put
him before the British and American public.

CHAPTER V: THE HOUSE COMMITTEE DISCUSS THE POETS

"There's one thing this house-boat needs," wrote Homer in the complaint-
book that adorned the centre-table in the reading-room, "and that is a
Poets' Corner. There are smoking-rooms for those who smoke, billiard-
rooms for those who play billiards, and a card-room for those who play
cards. I do not smoke, I can't play billiards, and I do not know a trey
of diamonds from a silver salver. All I can do is write poetry. Why
discriminate against me? By all mean