THE TALE OF A RAT.

Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 42, 22 June 1908, Page 8

THE TALE OF A RAT.

Hamlet is not the only person who has been led to a deed erf desperation by a rat. Some time ago, when Miss Follie Emery, who is acting at The Playhouse, was a passenger on board the Orient, she was asked to give a performance in aid of the Seaman’s Orphanage. She consented and suggested doing the well-known farce "Good-for-Nothing," if some of the other passengers could be induced to fill the cast. The performance was under the patronage of the Earl and Countess Kin tore, \ Captain Anstruther Thompson, and the Hon. Harry Trefusis—all passengers —the last of whom played one of the parts.- « The excitement and bustle of building the stage, conducting the rehearsals, and transforming the saloon into an auditorium, were very great, and everyone looked forward with interest to the evening of the performance.

The play had begun, and Mi»9 Emery, as Nan, was nervously waiting for her cue, when suddenly she was startled by a child’s piercing scream from one of the adjoining cabins. She rushed towards it, thinking from the cries that something terrible had happened when to her horror an enormous rat ran dqwn the passage. In her turn, she screamed with terror, and, making a frantic rush, tore wildly aqross the temporary stage, nearly bringing it down, long before her real entrance should have taken place.

The amazement at the sudden and unexpected appearance of Nan astonished the actors. Acting was, howevfer, something about which Miss Emery was not thinking. Her only thought was to escape from the rat, and on she went, blundering right among the 4 audience, among whom, too, the rat was running, and probably more frightened than the company.

Everybody, however, shouted and screamed with fright, the Women jumping on the backs of chairs and imploring the men to save them. At the psychological moment the ship’s faithful tom-cat made a dramatic entrance, and with one swift sudden spring caught the rat and carried it away in triumph, as the stalwart hero of a melodrama carries the fragile heroine, and to no less enthusiastic applause.

Then the audience settled down, and the play went on from the point at which it had been so ruthlessly interrupted* ‘ S ketch.' *•