Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/52

32 a stage fiction to be invisible. They squat or stand behind the actors they prompt during the first days of a play. They adjust any derangement of the actors’ dresses on the stage, or push a cushion or a stool to an important character when he is about to sit. Any stage property, maybe a sword, a screen, or a dress, when done with, is spirited away; or when a character is killed and his corpse encumbers the boards, the luckless actor is dragged away by the legs or carried bodily out. The blackamoor, in short, though too much en evidence to sustain the fiction of his invisibility, is useful in keeping the stage in order.

The usual run of a play is thirty-five days, on which the stage expenses and actors’ salaries are calculated; but that limit may be altered according to the public reception of the play in question.