I had reason to admire Mr. Brookfield's "powers of personation" when I
was acting at Buxton. He and Kemble had no parts in one of our plays, so
they amused themselves during their "off" night by hiring bath-chairs
and pretending to be paralytics! We were acting in a hall, and the most
infirm of the invalids visiting the place to take the waters were
wheeled in at the back, and up the center aisle. In the middle of a very
pathetic scene I caught sight of Kemble and Brookfield in their
bath-chairs, and could not _speak_ for several minutes.

Mr. Brookfield does not tell this little story in his "Random
Reminiscences." It is about the only one that he has left out! To my
mind he is the prince of storytellers. All the cleverness that he should
have put into his acting and his play-writing (of which since those
early days he has done a great deal) he seems to have put into his life.
I remember him more clearly as a delightful companion than an actor, and
he won my heart at once by his kindness to my little daughter Edy, who
accompanied me on this tour. He has too great a sense of humor to resent
my inadequate recollection of him. Did he not in his own book quote
gleefully from an obituary notice published on a false report of his
death, the summary: "Never a great actor, he was invaluable in small
parts. But after all it is at his club that he will be most missed!"

In the last act of "Butterfly," as we called the English version of
"Frou-Frou," where the poor woman is dying, her husband shows her a
locket with a picture of her child in it. Night after night we used a
"property" locket, but on my birthday, when we happened to be playing
the piece, Charles Kelly bought a silver locket of Indian work and put
inside it two little colored photographs of my children, Edy and Teddy,
and gave it to me on the stage instead of the "property" one. When I
opened it, I burst into very real tears! I have often wondered since if