dress than he did, he had
a finer sense of what was right for the _scene_. After this he always
consulted me about the costumes, but if he said: "I want such and such a
scene to be kept dark and mysterious," I knew better than to try and
introduce pale-colored dresses into it.

Henry always had a fondness for "the old actor," and would engage him in
preference to the tyro any day. "I can trust them," he explained
briefly.

In the cast of "Hamlet" Mr. Forrester, Mr. Chippendale, and Tom Mead
worthily repaid the trust. Mead, in spite of a terrible excellence in
"Meadisms"--he substituted the most excruciatingly funny words for
Shakespeare's when his memory of the text failed--was a remarkable
actor. His voice as the Ghost was beautiful, and his appearance
splendid. With his deep-set eyes, hawklike nose, and clear brow, he
reminded me of the Rameses head in the British Museum.

We had young men in the cast, too. There was one very studious youth who
could never be caught loafing. He was always reading, or busy in the
greenroom studying by turns the pictures of past actor-humanity with
which the walls were peopled, or the present realities of actors who
came in and out of the room. Although he was so much younger then, Mr.
Pinero looked much as he does now. He played Rosencrantz very neatly.
Consummate care, precision, and brains characterized his work as an
actor always, but his chief ambition lay another way. Rosencrantz and
the rest were his school of stage-craft.

Kyrle Bellew, the Osric of the production, was another man of the
future, though we did not know it. He was very handsome, a tremendous
lady-killer! He wore his hair rather long, had a graceful figure, and a
good voice, as became the son of a preacher who had the reputation of
saying the Lord's Prayer so dramatically that his congregation sobbed.

Frank Cooper, a descendant of the Kembles, another actor who has risen
to eminence since, played Laertes. It was he who first led me onto the
Lyceum stage. Twenty years later he became my leading man on the first
tour I took independently of Henry Irving since my tours with my
husband, Charles Kelly.

VIII

WORK AT THE LYCEUM

When I am asked what I remember about the first ten years at the Lyceum,
I can answer in one word: _Work_. I was hardly ever out of the theater.
What with acting, rehearsing, and studying--twenty-five reference books
were a "simple coming-in" for one part--I sometimes thought