Our taste for the drama in Dumbledowndeary,
though not often indulged, is vast. We
take trips to town sometimes, and go to the
play; and mighty are the discussions that
afterwards take place about the plays we have
seen. We have settlers amongst us, hermits
long since retired from the busy world, who
can remember Siddons, the elder Kean, and
Young. These " shoulder their crutch and
show how " plays were acted. There was a
dark man who lodged up the back lane last
year, and was supposed to have been formerly
a play-actor. It was mooted that he should
read Shakespeare in the schoolroom; and
he said he would think about it; which I
suppose he has been doing ever since, for no
more came of the proposition. We have
frequent bets of fours and sixes of
alcoholic fluids, respecting the exact readings
of quotations from the dramatists; and
reference being made to the authors' works
themselves, both parties are generally found to
be in the wrong. Lastly, though we have no
regular theatre (not even the smallest provincial
one, within ten miles), we are visited, with
tolerable regularity, once a year, by a band of
those peripatetic histrionics called strollers.
They omitted to visit us last year, and I grieved;
thinking the dramatic element in
Dumbledowndeary was on the decline; but a few
days since, walking up street, the time being
dinner time, and the object of my journey the
fruitless one of procuring a ha'porth of mint,
with a view to its conversion into sauce
for lamb, I was greeted with the intelligence
that the mummers were come.

The announcement was the more pleasant
as it followed close on the heels of another
class of amusements with which we have
lately been favoured. We have seen a sight
in Dumbledowndeary within the last
fortnight not unfamiliar, I dare say, to my older
and travelled readers, but which to the
younger portion must be quite novel and
surprising. What do you think of five wild
and picturesque foreigners appearing in
Dumbledowndeary, coming from no man knows
where, and going no man knew whither;
four of them leading two monstrous bears and
two hideous wolves, with chains and muzzles,
and the fifth man bearing a drum of uncouth
make, which he smote continuously! Bears
and wolves in England! They took us back
to the time of King Egbert, and the Royal
Bear, which lived in the Tower, and washed
himself in the River Thames. The bears
were brown beasts, with that pitiably half-
human appearance, which bears have when
on their hindlegs, of being distressed
mariners in shaggy brown coats and
trousers, much too loose for them: the
name of one of them was Martin, and a most
woe-begone Martin he was, with paws like
very dirty driving gloves, with the fingers
coming through, a preposterous muzzle, and
a general expression of the most infinite
raggedness and wretchedness. He danced, did
Martin, and went through the military
exercise, and kissed his keeper at the word of
command, with oh! such an unmistakable
longing in his countenance to amplify the
kiss into a hug, and a gnash, and a tear!
Martin's brother was a young bear— Martin
the foundling, perhaps— who, whether the
major part of his sorrows were yet to come,
according to the axiom, or not, seemed to
have quite enough of them now, and
abandoned himself to despair in the dust, at every
convenient opportunity, till forced to assume
the duopedal attitude by the cudgel of his
master. As to the two wolves, they were not
performing wolves, nor dancing wolves, nor
learned wolves, by any means: they were
simply wolves— lanky, brindled, savage-looking
creatures, whose existence was embittered
by an insufficiency of raw flesh, human or
otherwise, and by the necessity of wearing a
muzzle, and being tugged about by a chain.
They viewed the performances of their ursine
brethren with profound disgust and contempt:
their masters, whom they unwillingly permitted
to drag them along, with more disgust
still, mingled with fear and loathing. Man
delighted them not, nay, nor woman either;
the one sole object on which their attention
seemed fixed, and to which their desires were
directed, lay in the amalgamated legs of the
juvenile population of Dumbledowndeary.
For those tender, fleshy, tearable, crunchable,
howlable-for extremities did their fierce
mouths water, their teeth gnash, and their
eyeballs glare, and their bushy tails
disport themselves, in a manner horrid to
behold.

If the bears and the wolves, and their
strange keepers (the man with the drum was
a study in himself) were a source of amusement,
imagine what a fertile source of recreation
the strollers must have been. As
soon as I heard that the mummers were
come, I lost no time, you may be sure, in
repairing to the spot where they had set up
their theatre. It was not ill-chosen. A
green patch of land, with a natural
amphitheatre of turf around it, then a path, then
another patch, where Mr. Clewline, the
sailmaker, spreads out his sails like gigantic
table-cloths, and pitches them, or waterproofs
them, or does something to them with some
mysterious compound; and then the broad
shining river with the yachts dancing on its
bosom, like trim bits of nautical cabinet-
making; the dusky brick-laden barges with
heavy sails, that would seem to be impregnated
with brick-dust too, so dusky red are
they; the squat Prussian and Swedish barks
waiting at the ballast wharf; the Gravesend
steamer puffing and smoking along the channel
on the Essex side; the unobtrusive, yet
labouring ant-like little tugs, pilot fishes
to great sharks and whales of Yankee
liners, and Green's Indiamen and Australian
packet-ships, deep in the water with auriferous
cargoes. There is one-legged Barker in his