containing £63 10s. on the counter at the chief post-office in Swansea, one day last week, while he changed a postal order. When he turned to pick up the bag it had disappeared. The local police incline to the view that someone must have taken it.

A muddle-headed correspondent writes to express surprise on learning that the day devoted to collections for the charities connected with the Variety Stage should be known as "Tag Day." The old fellow had always imagined that "Tag Day" was a toast on German war vessels.

A TIME EXPOSURE.

I turned the family album's page
And noted with a smile
The efforts of a bygone age
At photographic style;
There, pegtopped, grandpa could be seen,
While grandma beamed, contented
To know her brand-new crinoline
The latest thing invented.

And there Aunt Mary's looks belied
Her gravity of dress;
That great poke-bonnet could not hide
Her youthful comeliness;
There, too, was father when a boy,
And elsewhere in the series
A youthful cousin (Fauntleroy),
An uncle in Dundrearies.

And then before my scornful eye
A smirking youth appeared,
Flaunting a loose æsthetic tie
And embryonic beard;
With laughter I began to shake,
Noting the watch-chain (weighty)
And all the things that went to make
A "nut" in 1880.

I looked upon the other side,
Still tittering, to see
What branch the fellow occupied
Upon our family tree;
A name was scrawled across the card
With flourishes in plenty,
And lo! it was the present bard
Himself at five-and-twenty.

The Sprinter.

From a testimonial to a system of health culture:—

He mustn't take too much exercise.

THE COMPLETE DRAMATIST.

III. Meals and Things.

In spite of all you can do in the way of avoiding soliloquies and getting your characters on and off the stage in a dramatic manner, a time will come when you realise sadly that your play is not a bit like life after all. Then is the time to introduce a meal on the stage. A stage meal is popular, because it proves to the audience that the actors, even when called George Alexander or Arthur Bourchier, are real people just like you and me. "Look at Sir Herbert eating," we say excitedly to each other in the pit, having had a vague idea up till then that an actor lived like a god on praise and grease-paint and his photograph in the papers. "Another cup, won't you?" says Miss Gladys Cooper; "No, thank you," says Mr. Dennis Eadie—dash it, it's exactly what we do at Twickenham ourselves. And when, to clinch matters, the dramatist makes Mr. Gerald du Maurier light a real cigarette in the Third Act, then he can flatter himself that he has indeed achieved the ambition of every stage writer, and "brought the actual scent of the hay across the footlights."

But there is a technique to be acquired in this matter as in