The fourth act can be at Niagara Falls, and we'll send him over the falls; and for a grand climax we can have him guillotined just after he has swallowed a quart of prussic acid and a spoonful of powdered glass.

Do that for me, William, and you are forgiven.

I'll play it for six hundred nights in London, for two years in New York, and round up with a one-night stand in Boston." "It sounds like a good scheme," said Shakespeare, meditatively.

"What shall we call it ?" "Call it _Irving_," said Eugene Aram, who had entered.

"I too have suffered." "And let me be Hamlet's understudy," said Charles the First, earnestly.
"Done!" said Shakespeare, calling for a pad and pencil.
And as the sun rose upon the Styx the next morning the Bard of Avon was to be seen writing a comic chorus to be sung over the moribund tragedian by the shades of Charles, Aram, and other eminent deceased heroes of the stage, with which his new play of _Irving_ was to be brought to an appropriate close.
This play has not as yet found its way upon the boards, but any enterprising manager who desires to consider it may address _Hamlet_, _The House-Boat_, _Hades-on-the-Styx_.
He is sure to get a reply by return mail, unless Mephistopheles interferes, which is not unlikely, since Mephistopheles is said to have been much pleased with the manner in which the eminent tragedian has put him before the British and American public..