We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address

Contents

A CIGARETTE-MAKER'S ROMANCE.

The inner room of a tobacconist's shop is not perhaps the spot which awriter of fiction would naturally choose as the theatre of his play, nordoes the inventor of pleasant romances, of stirring incident, or movinglove-tales feel himself instinctively inclined to turn to Munich as tothe city of his dreams. On the other hand, it is by no means certainthat, if the choice of a stage for our performance were offered to themost contented among us, we should be satisfied to speak our parts andgo through our actor's business upon the boards of this world. Somewould prefer to take their properties, their player's crowns and robes,their aspiring expressions and their finely expressed aspirations beforethe audience of a larger planet; others, perhaps the majority, wouldchoose, with more humility as well as with more common sense, theshadowy scenery, the softer footlights and the less exigent[Pg 2] public of amodest asteroid, beyond the reach of our earthly haste, of our noisy andunclean high-roads to honour, of our furious chariot races round thegoals of fame, and, especially, beyond the reach of competition. But wehave no choice. We are in the world and, before we know where we are, weare on one of the paths which we must traverse in our few score yearsbetween birth and death. Moreover, each man's path leads up to thetheatre on the one side and down from it on the other. The inexorablemanager, Fate, requires that each should go through with his comedy orhis drama, if he be judged worthy of a leading part, with his scene orhis act in another man's piece, if he be fit only to play the walkinggentleman, the dumb footman, or the mechanically trained supernumerarywho does duty by turns as soldier, sailor, courtier, husbandman,conspirator or red-capped patriot. A few play well, many play badly, all