did not detract from it.

The sewing-machines and the cutting-table had been cast into corners and well in the glare of the electric light the President was exclaiming in a voice which would have disgraced an early phonograph, "Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt."

It was not a dress rehearsal but the too solid Prince wore his hair low on his neck and a golden fillet bound his brows. Silent, he was noble. His walk as he came in at the end of a procession of court ladies and gentlemen was magnificent—slow, dejected, imperious, aloof. But Wittenberg had a great deal to answer for, if he had contracted his accent there.

Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, was a Hyacinth who worked daily at hooks and buttonholes for an East Broadway tailor. On this night she wore none of her regalia save her crown and the King had done nothing at all to differentiate himself from Susie Lacov who officiated as waitress in a Jewish lunchroom.

The Hyacinths had wisely decided to edit Hamlet. In this they followed an almost universal principle and their method was also time-honored. All the scenes in which unimportant members of the club or cast "came out strong," were eliminated. So far the Hyacinths were orthodox, but Rosie Rosenbaum, Prince, President and Censor, went a step further.

"Git busy. Mix her up, why don't you!" she commanded later from the wings. The other players were laboriously wading through persiflage and conversation. "You folks ain't done nothin' the last ten minutes only stand there and gas. Is that actin'? Maybe it's wrote in the book. What I want to know is—is it actin'?" Burgess sat suddenly erect and his eyes glowed. Miss Masters half rose to assume authority but he restrained her.

"You shut up and leave me be," Polonius cried. "Ain't I got a right to say good-bye to my son?"

"You can say good-bye all right," Rosie reminded her, "without puttin' up that game of talk. Give him a 'I'll be a sister to you' on the cheek an' git through sometime before to-morrow. Cut it, I tell you."

This "off with his head" attitude on the President's part delighted Burgess. But the caste enjoyed it less and when the ghost was docked of a whole scene it grew rebellious.

"If you give me any more of your lip," said the princely stage manager, "I'll trow you out altogether. There's lots of people wouldn't believe in ghosts anyway. Me grandfather seen this play in Chermany and he told me they didn't use the ghost at all. Nothin' but a green light with a voice comin' out of it."

"Well, I could be the voice, couldn't I?" the ghost argued; and it was at this point that Miss Masters took charge of the meeting and introduced Mr. Burgess.

"Who has offered," she went on in spite of his energetic pantomime of disclaimer, "to help us with our play."

"That's real sweet of you, Mr. Burgess," said the President graciously.

"Not at all—not at all," he answered. "It will be a pleasure, I assure you."

"You'll excuse me, I'm sure," the Secretary broke in, "if we go right on with our woik while you're here. We're makin' our own costoomes, as much as we can. That was one reason us young ladies chose Hamlet. It's a play what everyone wears skoits in. It's easier for us and it ain't so embarrassing, and I guess our folks will like it better. You have to think of your folks sometimes. Even if they are old-fashioned. Miss Masters got us pictures of Mr. Marsden's production an' every last one of the characters has skoits on. Hamlet's ain't no longer than a bathin' suit, but anyway it's there. I don't think it's real refined, myself, for young ladies to wear gents' suits on the stage."

"And of course," a gentle-eyed little girl looked up from her sewing to remark,—"of course this club ain't formed just for makin' shirt waists. We've got a culture-an'-refinement clause in the club constitution, so we wouldn't want to do nothin' that wasn't real refined."

BURGESS GAINED AN INTEREST AND AN OCCUPATION MORE ABSORBING THAN HE HAD FOUND FOR MANY YEARS.

"I understand," said Burgess more at a loss than a conversation had ever found him, "And what may I ask, is your part of the play?"

"Mamie Conners is too nervous," the lady President explained "to come right out and act. She's 'A flourish of trumpets within an' a voice without an' a lady of the court an' a soldier an' a choir boy at the funeral.'"

"Ah, Miss Conners," Burgess assured this timid but versatile Hyacinth, "that's only stage fright, all great actresses suffer from it at one time or another."

During the weeks that followed, order gradually gained sway in Denmark and Burgess gained an interest and an occupation more absorbing than he had found for many years.

"My dear Margaret," he was wont to assure Miss Masters, when she remonstrated with him upon his generosity, "Why shouldn't I order supper to be sent in for them? and why shouldn't I ask them up to the house for rehearsals? There's the big music room going to waste and those lazy beggars of servants with nothing to do, and you saw yourself how it brightened up poor old Aunt Priscilla. She likes it—they like it—I like it—you ought to like it. And you certainly can't object to my having taken them en masse to see Marsden in the play. By George! I'll drag him to theirs. We'll show him an Ophelia! that Mary Conners is a little genius."

"She is wonderful," agreed Miss Masters. "The grace of her! The dignity! What she herself would call the culture-an'-refinement!"

"All my discovery. That tyrant of a Rosie Rosenbaum had cast her as a quick change, general utility woman. And in the day-time you tell me she's a miserable little shop-girl in a Grand Street rookery!"

"That is what she used to be. But I went to the shop a day or two ago to ask her to come up to my house to rehearse with the new Hamlet. I watched her for a few moments before she noticed me. She was Ophelia to the life. She conversed in blank verse. She walked about with that little queenly air you have taught her. She was delicious, adorable. At first she said that she could not rehearse that night, but I told her you wished it and she came like a lamb. I often wonder if I did a wise thing in introducing them to you. Your sort of culture-an'-refinement' may rather upset them when the play is over and we all settle back to the humdrum."

"You did a great kindness to me," said he, "and the best stroke of missionary work you'll do in a dog's age. I'm going to work."

"You are not," she laughed.

"I am. Shamed into it by the Lady Hyacinths."

"Then perhaps the balance will be maintained. If you turn them against labor they will have turned you toward it."

But Miss Masters' fears were groundless: the Lady Hyacinths though dedicated to a flower of spring were old and wise in social distinctions. The story of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid would have drawn only a contemptuous "cut it out" from the lady President. Every Hyacinth of them knew her exact place in nature's garden—all except Mary Conners—now Ophelia—and she knew herself to be a foundling with no place at all. The lonely woman who had adopted her was now dead and Mary was quite alone in her little two-room tenement, free to dream and play Ophelia to her heart's content and to an imaginary Hamlet who was always Burgess. To her he was indeed, "The expectancy and rose of the fair state." "The glass of fashion and the mould of form." He was "her honoured lord"—"her most dear lord." But in Monroe Street she never deceived him. Never handed his letters over to interfering relatives. She could quite easily go mad and tuneful when she knew that each rehearsal—each lesson taught by him and so quickly