Never, never can I forget Charles Reade's arrival at the theater in a
four-wheeler with a goat and a lot of little pigs. When the cab drew up
at the stage-door, the goat seemed to say, as plainly as any goat could:
"I'm dashed if I stay in this cab any longer with these pigs!" and while
Charles Reade was trying to pacify it, the piggies escaped!
Unfortunately, they didn't all go in the same direction, and poor dear
Charles Reade had a "divided duty." There was the goat, too, in a nasty
mood. Oh, his serious face, as he decided to leave the goat and run for
the pigs, with his loose trousers, each one a yard wide at least,
flapping in the wind!

"That's a relief, at any rate," said Charles Kelly, who was watching the
flight of the pigs. "I sha'n't have those d----d pigs to spoil my acting
as well as the d----d dog and the d----d goat!"

How we all laughed when Charles Reade returned from the pig-hunt to
rehearsal with the brief direction to the stage manager that the pigs
would be "cut out."

The reason for the real wall was made more evident when the real goat
was tied up to it. A painted wall would never have stood such a strain.

On the first night, the real dog bit Kelly's real ankles, and in real
anger he kicked the real animal by a real mistake into the orchestra's
real drum.

So much for realism as practiced by Charles Reade! There was still
something to remind him of the experiment in Rachael, the circus goat.
Rachael--he was no she, but what of that?--was given the free run of the
garden of Reade's house at Knightsbridge. He had everything that any