ong time in coming to the pantomime;
I am not ready to come to it yet in due course, for we ought to go and
see the Japanese jugglers first, in order to let me fully explain to
you what I mean. But I can't write much more to-day; so I shall merely
tell you what part of the play set me thinking of all this, and leave
you to consider of it yourself, till I can send you another letter.
The pantomime was, as I said, 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.' The
forty thieves were girls. The forty thieves had forty companions, who
were girls. The forty thieves and their forty companions were in some
way mixed up with about four hundred and forty fairies, who were
girls. There was an Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, in which the
Oxford and Cambridge men were girls. There was a transformation scene,
with a forest, in which the flowers were girls, and a chandelier, in
which the lamps were girls, and a great rainbow which was all of
girls.

23. Mingled incongruously with these seraphic, and, as far as my
boyish experience extends, novel, elements of pantomime, there were
yet some of its old and fast-expiring elements. There were, in
speciality, two thoroughly good pantomime actors--Mr. W. H. Payne and
Mr. Frederick Payne. All that these two did, was done admirably. There
were two subordinate actors, who played, subordinately well, the fore
and hind legs of a donkey. And there was a little actress of whom I
have chiefly to speak, who played exquisitely the little part she had
to play. The scene in which she appeared was the only one in the whole
pantomime in which there was any dramatic effort, or, with a few rare
exceptions, any dramatic possibility. It was the home scene, in which
Ali Baba's wife, on washing day, is called upon by butcher, baker,
and milkman, with unpaid bills; and in the extremity of her distress
hears her husband's knock at the door, and opens it for him to drive
in his donkey, laden with gold. The children who have been beaten
instead of getting breakfast, presently share in the raptures of their
father and mother; and the little lady I spoke of, eight or nine years
old,--dances a _pas-de-deux_ with the donkey.

24. She did it beautifully and simply, as a child ought to dance. She
was not an infant prodigy; there was no evidence, in the finish or
strength of her motion, that she had been put to continual torture
through half her eight or nine years. She did nothing more than any
child well taught, but painlessly, m