nightshirt, consisting of a very fine crimson silk handkerchief, richly
broidered with gold, which had been brought to him from India, and which
at first, in the innocence of his heart, he used to wear on Sundays,
until he acquired the sobriquet of "the Dragon." Duncan made a
superb Macbeth.

They were doing the dagger-scene, which was put on the stage in a most
novel manner. A sheet had been pinned from the top of the room, on one
side of which stood a boy with a broken dinner knife, the handle end of
which he was pushing through a hole in the middle of the sheet at the
shadow of Duncan on the other side.

Duncan himself, in an attitude of intensely affected melodrama, was
spouting--

"Is this a dagger which I see before me?
The handle towards me now? come, let me clutch thee;"

And he snatched convulsively at the handle of the protruded knife; but
as soon as he nearly touched it, this end was immediately withdrawn, and
the blade end substituted, which made the comic Macbeth instantly draw
back again, and recommence his apostrophe. This scene had tickled the
audience immensely, and Duncan, amid shouts of laughter, was just
drawing the somewhat unwarrantable conclusion that it was

"A dagger of the mind, a false creation,"

when a sudden grating, followed by a reverbrated clang, produced a dead
silence.