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and to salute them. When this was reported in the green-room, it spread dismay among the actresses; but it was represented to them that there was a general wish among the Americans to conciliate the Indians, that the popularity of the company might be injured by offending the swarthy strangers, and that their request, after all, had been made in no immodest spirit, and might be complied with without the least degradation on the part of the ladies. Some of the heavenly women, therefore, allowed a kiss to their savage admirers, who took no further liberty. Mrs. Whitelock was about to go through the same ceremony, when a fit of shyness came over her, and she shrank from the salute of the chief who came up to her. But the most polished gentleman, she said, could not have behaved with more delicate courtesy than this blanketed Indian. He put his hand to his breast, bowed respectfully, and retired.

All the Indian diplomatists, however, were not endowed with the same polite gallantry. One day, Mrs. Whitelock observed one of them eyeing and following her at a distance in the streets of Philadelphia. Her house was situated out of the town, and she had to cross an unfrequented common before she could reach it. At the suburbs there were several negroes, who were selling fruit, and she offered a dollar to any one of them who would accompany her home, and protect her from the approaching Indian. But the blacks, who are free in that part of the States, only laughed at her distress; so she had to post all alone over the common, like another Daphne, with her copper Apollo in interesting proximity behind her. At last, in a panting panic, she got home just in time to shut the gate in his face; and, before she had well recovered to tell the cause of her fright, the pursuer had disappeared. But the same evening, whilst Mr. Whitelock and she

were at supper, a crash, like the stroke of a battering-ram, was heard at the gardengate. The Indian had burst it open by throwing a large stone against it, and her picturesque admirer was seen by moonlight deliberately walking up the avenue towards the house. Mr. Whitelock immediately took down a sabre and fire-arms, but he had no occasion to use them; for an athletic young Englishman, who lived in the house, rushed out, and repaid the intruder for his crash at the door by a stroke upon his jaw that was almost equally audible. The savage took his punishment very quietly, and, after one flooring, got up and walked back to Philadelphia.

To return to the immediate subject of these memoirs--our great actress's birth-place was Brecon, or Brecknon, in South Wales. A friend has obligingly written to me as follows respecting the house in which Mrs. Siddons

was born: "It is a public-house in the high street of this town, which still retains its appellation, 'The Shoulder of Mutton,' though now entirely altered from its pristine appearance. I send you a drawing of the house, not as it is at present, but as I perfectly well remember seeing it stand, with its gable

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front, projecting upper floors, and a rich wellfed shoulder of mutton painted over the door, offering an irresistible temptation to the sharpened appetites of the Welsh farmers, who

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frequented the adjoining market-place; especially as within doors the same, or some similar object in a more substantial shape, was always, at the accustomed hour, seen roasting at the kitchen fire, on a spit turned by a dog in a wheel, the invariable mode in all Breconian kitchens. In addition to which noontide entertainment for country guests, there was abundance of Welsh ale of the rarest quality; and, as the Shoulder of Mutton' was situated in the centre of Brecon, it was much resorted to by the neighbouring inhabitants of the borough. If I am rightly informed, old Kemble was neither an unwilling nor an unwelcome member of their jolly associations. Those who remember him tell me that he was a man of respectable family, and of some small hereditary property in Herefordshire; and that having married the daughter of a provincial manager, he received a company of strolling players for her dowry, and set up as a manager himself."

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