"I _am_," he answered. This is
what crippled his Othello, and made his scene with Tubal in "The
Merchant of Venice" the least successful _to him_. What it was to the
audience is another matter. But he had to take refuge in speechless rage
when he would have liked to pour out his words like a torrent.

In the company which Charles Kelly and I took round the provinces in
1880 were Henry Kemble and Charles Brookfield. Young Brookfield was just
beginning life as an actor, and he was so brilliantly funny off the
stage that he was always a little disappointing _on_ it. My old
manageress, Mrs. Wigan, first brought him to my notice, writing in a
charming little note that she knew him "to have a power of _personation_
very rare in an unpracticed actor," and that if we could give him varied
practice, she would feel it a courtesy to her.

I had reason to admire Mr. Brookfield's "powers of personation" when I
was acting at Buxton. He and Kemble had no parts in one of our plays, so
they amused themselves during their "off" night by hiring bath-chairs
and pretending to be paralytics! We were acting in a hall, and the most
infirm of the invalids visiting the place to take the waters were
wheeled in at the back, and up the center aisle. In the middle of a very
pathetic scene I caught sight of Kemble and Brookfield in their
bath-chairs, and could not _speak_ for several minutes.

Mr. Brookfield does not tell this little story in his "Random
Reminiscences." It is about the only one that he has left out! To my
mind he is the prince of storytellers. All the cleverness that he should
have put into his acting and his play-writing (of which since those
early days he has done a great deal) he seems to have put into his life.
I remember him more clearly as a delightful companion than an actor, and
he won my heart at once by his kindness to my little daughter Edy, who
accompanied me on this tour. He has too great a sense of humor to resent
my inadequate recollection of him. Did he not in his own book quote
gleefully from an obituary notice published on a false report of his
death, the summary: "Never a great actor, he was invaluable in small
parts. But after all it is at his club that he will be most missed!"

In the last act of "Butterfly," as we called the English version of
"Frou-Frou," where the poor woman is dying, her husband shows her a
locket with a picture of her child in it. Night after night we used a
"property" locket, but on my