any other piece of stage property, they are at last put aside and
simply left there at the end of some season--there seems to be a
superstition against selling or burning useless and dilapidated stage
property. As it came to me, the idea was not an impossibility.
The last representation of the season is over. She, tired beyond
judgment--haply, beyond feeling--by her tireless role, sinks upon her
chair to rest in her dressing-room; sinks, further, to sleep. She has
no maid. The troupe, hurrying away to France on the special train
waiting not half a dozen blocks away, forget her--the insignificant
are so easily forgotten! The porter, more tired, perhaps, than any
one of the beautiful ideal world about him, and savoring already in
advance the good onion-flavored _grillade_ awaiting him at home, locks
up everything fast and tight; the tighter and faster for the good
fortnight's vacation he has promised himself.

No doubt if the old opera-house were ever cleaned out, just such a
heap of stiff, wire-strung bones would be found, in some such hole
as the _dugazon's_ dressing-room, desiccating away in its last
costume--perhaps in that very costume of _Inez_; and if one were
venturesome enough to pass Allhallowe'en there, the spirit of those
bones might be seen availing itself of the privilege of unasperged
corpses to roam. Not singing, not talking--it is an anachronism to say
that ghosts talk: their medium of communication must be pure thought;
and one should be able to see their thoughts working, just as one sees
the working of the digestive organs in the clear viscera of
transparent animalcule. The hard thing of it is that ghosts are
chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they
sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former
existence. What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived
and done, the suffered and finished! What a comfort to wake up and
find one's self dead, well dead!

I could have continued and put the whole opera troupe in "costume de
ghost," but I think it was the woman's eyes that drew me back to her
face and her story. She had a sensible face, now that I observed her
naturally, as it were; and her hands,--how I have agonized over those
hands on the stage!--all knuckles and exaggerated veins, clutching her
dress as she sang, or, petrified, outstretched to _Leonore's_ "Pourquoi
ces larmes?"--her hands were the hands of an honest, hard-working
woman who buckrams he