Where Brotherly (and Sisterly) Love reigns supreme.

The family tie is always strong on the music-hall stage.  The acrobatic troupe is always a “Family”: Pa, Ma, eight brothers and sisters, and the baby.  A more affectionate family one rarely sees.  Pa and Ma are a trifle stout, but still active.  Baby, dear little fellow, is full of humour.  Ladies do not care to go on the music-hall stage unless they can take their sister with them.  I have seen a performance given by eleven sisters, all the same size and apparently all the same age.  She must have been a wonderful woman—the mother.  They all had golden hair, and all wore precisely similar frocks—a charming but décolletée arrangement—in claret-coloured velvet over blue silk stockings.  So far as I could gather, they all had the same young man.  No doubt he found it difficult amongst them to make up his mind.

“Arrange it among yourselves,” he no doubt had said, “it is quite immaterial to me.  You are so much alike, it is impossible that a fellow loving one should not love the lot of you.  So long as I marry into the family I really don’t care.”

When a performer appears alone on the music-hall stage it is easy to understand why.  His or her domestic life has been a failure.  I listened one evening to six songs in succession.  The first two were sung by a gentleman.  He entered with his clothes hanging upon him in shreds.  He explained that he had just come from an argument with his wife.  He showed us the brick with which she had hit him, and the bump at the back of his head that had resulted.  The funny man’s marriage is never a success.  But really this seems to be his own fault.  “She was such a lovely girl,” he tells us, “with a face—well, you’d hardly call it a face, it was more like a gas explosion.  Then she had those wonderful sort of eyes that you can see two ways at once with, one of them looks down the street, while the other one is watching round the corner.  Can see you coming any way.  And her mouth!”

It appears that if she stands anywhere near the curb and smiles, careless people mistake her for a pillar-box, and drop letters into her.

“And such a voice!”  We are told it is a perfect imitation of a motor-car.  When she laughs people spring into doorways to escape being run over.

If he will marry that sort of woman, what can he expect?  The man is asking for it.

The lady who followed him also told us a sad story of misplaced trust.  She also was comic—so the programme assured us.  The humorist appears to have no luck.  She had lent her lover money to buy the ring, and the licence, and to furnish the flat.  He did buy the ring, and he furnished the flat, but it was for another lady.  The audience roared.  I have heard it so often asked, “What is humour?”  From observation, I should describe it as other people’s troubles.

A male performer followed her.  He came on dressed in a night-shirt, carrying a baby.  His wife, it seemed, had gone out for the evening with the lodger.  That was his joke.  It was the most successful song of the whole six.