y, however, he was so
late that it was past a joke, and Henry spoke to him sharply.

"I think you'll be sorry you've spoken to me like this, Guv'nor," said
Terriss, casting down his eyes.

"Now no hanky-panky tricks, Terriss."

"Tricks, Guv'nor! I think you'll regret having said that when you hear
that my poor mother passed away early this morning."

And Terriss wept.

Henry promptly gave him the day off. A few weeks later, when Terriss and
I were looking through the curtain at the audience just before the play
began, he said to me gaily:

"See that dear old woman sitting in the fourth row of stalls--that's my
dear old mother."

The wretch had quite forgotten that he had killed her!

He was the only person who ever ventured to "cheek" Henry, yet he never
gave offense, not even when he wrote a letter of this kind:

"My dear Guv.,--

"I hope you are enjoying yourself, and in the best of health. I very
much want to play 'Othello' with you next year (don't laugh). Shall I
study it up, and will you do it with me on tour if possible? Say _yes_,
and lighten the drooping heart of yours sincerely,

"WILL TERRISS."

I have never seen any one at all like Terriss, and my father said the
same. The only actor of my father's day, he used to tell me, who had a
touch of the same insouciance and lawlessness was Leigh Murray, a famous
_jeune premier_.

One night he came into the theater soaked from head to foot.

"Is it raining, Terriss?" said some one who noticed that he was wet.

"Looks like it, doesn't it?" said Terriss carelessly.

Later it came out that he had jumped off a penny steamboat into the
Thames and saved a little girl's life. It was pretty brave, I think.

Mr. Pinero, who was no longer a member of the Lyceum company when "Much
Ado" was produced, wrote to Henry after the first night that it was "as
perfect a representation of a Shakespearean play as I conceive to be
possible. I think," he added, "that the work at your theater does so
much to create new playgoers--which is what we want, far more I fancy
than we want new theaters and perhaps new plays."

A playgoer whose knowledge of the English stage extended over a period
of fifty-five years, wrote another nice letter about "Much Ado" which
was passed on to me because it had some ridiculously nice things about
me in it.

SAVILE CLUB,
_January 13, 1883._

"My dear Henry,--

"I were an imbecile ingrate if I did not hasten to give you my warmest
tha