yard of
an old farmer of the codger type, who knew her father and mother. She at
once sings, one doesn't know why, 'Oh, dear, what can the matter be,'
and she takes out of her poor little carpet-bag a rag-doll, and puts it
to sleep with 'By low, baby,' and the old codger puts the other dolls to
sleep, nodding his head, and kicking his foot out in time, and he ends
by offering that poor thing a home with him. If he had not done it, I do
not know how I could have borne it, for my heart was in my throat with
pity, and the tears were in my eyes. Good heavens! What simple
instruments we men are! The falsest note in all Hamlet is in those words
of his to Guildenstern: 'You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound
me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.... 'S blood, do you
think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?' Guildenstern ought to
have said: 'Much, my lord! Here is an actor who has been summering in
the country, and has caught a glimpse of pathetic fact commoner than the
dust in the road, and has built it up in a bit of drama as artless as a
child would fancy, and yet it swells your heart and makes you cry. Your
mystery? You have no mystery to an honest man. It is only fakes and
frauds who do not understand the soul. The simplest willow whistle is an
instrument more complex than man.' That is what I should have said in
Guildenstern's place if I had had Hamlet with me there at the vaudeville
show.

"In the pretty language of the playbill," the contributor went on, "this
piece was called 'A Pastoral Playlet,' and I should have been willing to
see 'Mandy Hawkins' over again, instead of the 'Seals and Sea Lions,'
next placarded at the sides of the curtain immediately lifted on them.
Perhaps I have seen too much of seals, but I find the range of their
accomplishments limited, and their impatience for fish and lump sugar
too frankly greedy before and after each act. Their banjo-playing is of
a most casual and irrelevant sort; they ring bells, to be sure; in
extreme cases they fire small cannon; and their feat of balancing large
and little balls on their noses is beyond praise. But it may be that the
difficulties overcome are too obvious in their instances; I find myself
holding my breath, and helping them along too strenuously for my
comfort. I am always glad when the curtain goes down on them; their mere
flumping about the stage makes me un