The stage hero is a very powerful man. You wouldn't think it to look
at him, but you wait till the heroine cries "Help! Oh, George, save
me!" or the police attempt to run him in. Then two villains, three
extra hired ruffians and four detectives are about his
fighting-weight.

If he knocks down less than three men with one blow, he fears that he
must be ill, and wonders "Why this strange weakness?"

The hero has his own way of making love. He always does it from
behind. The girl turns away from him when he begins (she being, as we
have said, shy and timid), and he takes hold of her hands and breathes
his attachment down her back.

The stage hero always wears patent-leather boots, and they are always
spotlessly clean. Sometimes he is rich and lives in a room with seven
doors to it, and at other times he is starving in a garret; but in
either event he still wears brand-new patent-leather boots.

He might raise at least three-and-sixpence on those boots, and when
the baby is crying for food, it occurs to us that it would be better
if, instead of praying to Heaven, he took off those boots and pawned
them; but this does not seem to occur to him.

He crosses the African desert in patent-leather boots, does the stage
hero. He takes a supply with him when he is wrecked on an uninhabited
island. He arrives from long and trying journeys; his clothes are
ragged and torn, but his boots are new and shiny. He puts on
patent-leather boots to tramp through the Australian bush, to fight in
Egypt, to discover the north pole.