Sothern told me that he was driven nearly mad during the long run of Lord
Dundreary--or, rather, _Our American Cousin_, as the play was
named--at the Haymarket. He found it almost impossible to repeat his own
jokes before a house in which he invariably recognised many familiar
faces. He was constantly driven to vary his "gag," in order to amuse
these veterans of the theatre, and it was in a large measure to escape
from them that he made his provincial tour. In one of his conversations
on the stage with the fair Georgina, who was endeavouring to entrap him
into marriage, he used sometimes, at the moment when the lady thought
that he was about to propose, to put a question of a very different kind:
"Can you wag your left ear?" I asked him one day what had made him invent
so ridiculous a question as this. "Because I _can_ wag my left ear,"
was his prompt response, and straightway I saw the organ in question
flapping about like a sail in a breeze. The Theatre Royal at Newcastle in
those days was under the management of Mr. E. D. Davis, a well-known
figure in the provincial theatrical world. It was before the days of
touring companies, and Mr. Davis was supported by an excellent body of
artists, including his brother and his son Alfred, as well as his niece
Emily Cross. I went to the theatre in the dignified capacity of dramatic
critic; but neither then, nor at any subsequent period of my life, did I
fall a victim to that passion for the drama to which so many Pressmen
succumb. Indeed, I have a lively recollection of incurring the
well-merited reproof of pretty Miss Cross for having engaged in one of
the stage boxes in a hot political discussion with another Newcastle
journalist, Mr. Joseph Cowen to wit. Yet it was at Newcastle that I had
my first and last association with dramatic authorship. One of the
Davises had written a play which he had called _Wild Flowers_. He
asked me to read the manuscript, and when I had done so I suggested that
it should be entitled _The Marriage Contract_, an emendation which