why she doesn't get married, and prattles to her about love, and
domestic bliss, and young men, and any other subject it can think of
particularly calculated to lacerate the poor girl's heart until her
brain nearly gives way.

After that it runs amuck up and down the whole play and makes
everybody sit up all round. It asks eminently respectable old maids
if they wouldn't like to have a baby; and it wants to know why
bald-headed old men have left off wearing hair, and why other old
gentlemen have red noses and if they were always that color.

In some plays it so happens that the less said about the origin and
source of the stage child the better; and in such cases nothing will
appear so important to that contrary brat as to know, in the middle of
an evening-party, who its father was!

Everybody loves the stage child. They catch it up in their bosoms
every other minute and weep over it. They take it in turns to do
this.

Nobody--on the stage, we mean--ever has enough of the stage child.
Nobody ever tells the stage child to "shut up" or to "get out of
this." Nobody ever clumps the stage child over the head.

When the real child goes to the theater it must notice these things
and wish it were a stage child.

The stage child is much admired by the audience. Its pathos makes
them weep; its tragedy thrills them; its declamation--as for instance
when it takes the center of the stage and says it will kill the wicked