, it is pleasant to note that there was, so far, no great
"incompatibility of temper" between him and his wife. He speaks of
her enthusiastically, in his correspondence, as a "most admirable
traveller," and expatiates on the good temper and equanimity with
which she had borne the fatigues and jars of a most trying journey.
And the third point to which I will call attention is the thoroughly
characteristic form of rest to which he had recourse in the midst of
all his toil and travel. Most men would have sought relaxation in
being quiet. He found it in vigorously getting up private theatricals
with the officers of the Coldstream Guards, at Montreal. Besides
acting in all the three pieces played, he also accepted the part of
stage manager; and "I am not," he says, "placarded as stage manager
for nothing. Everybody was told that they would have to submit to the
most iron despotism, and didn't I come Macready over them? Oh no, by
no means; certainly not. The pains I have taken with them, and the
perspiration I have expended, during the last ten days, exceed in
amount anything you can imagine." What bright vitality, and what a
singular charm of exuberant animal spirits!

And who was glad one evening--which would be about the last evening in
June, or the first of July--when a hackney coach rattled up to the
door of the house in Devonshire Terrace, and four little folk, two
girls and two boys, were hurried down, and kissed through the bars of
the gate, because their father was too eager to wait till it was
opened? Who were glad but the little folk aforementioned--I say
nothing of the joy of father and mother; for children as they were, a
sense of sorrowful loss had been theirs while their parents were away,
and greater strictness seems to have reigned in the good Macready's
household than in their own joyous home. It is Miss Dickens herself
who tells us this, and in whose memory has lingered that pretty scene
of the kiss through the bars in the summer gloaming. And she has much
to tell us too of her father's tenderness and care,--of his sympathy
with the children's terrors, so that, for instance, he would sit
beside the cot of one of the little girls who had been startled, and
hold her hand in his till she fell asleep; of his having them on his
knees, and singing to them the merriest of comic songs; of his
interest in all their small concerns; of the many pet names with which
he invested them.[17] Then, as they grew older, ther