Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's Company was not the only combination that
offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December Saturday
night. The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his "Surprise Party"--he
sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended from the
hills--had been advertising "Side-splitting begins at 9:30. Prices as
usual," with reference to this particular evening for a fortnight. In
the Athenian Theatre--it had a tin roof, and nobody could hear the
orchestra when it rained--the Midgets were presenting the earlier
collaborations of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed
under nine years of age. Colonel Pike's Great Occidental Circus had been
in full blast on the Maidan for a week. It became a great occidental
circus when Colonel Pike married the proprietress. They were both
staying at the Grand Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a
relict through cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do
with, to say nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office.
And certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for while
hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in the excusably
imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural feature of the cold
weather.
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