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98 MELODRAMA
grown sadder and wiser. There is no ignoring the nostalgia which was part of the maudlin fog now enfolding English life. A Frenchman described the most popular of juvenile entertainments — Nigger Minstrels — as a company of undertakers rattling cross-bones while singing songs about the dead, which was true. Similarly melodrama's heroes, like the glum villains of the drawing-room drama, suffered heavily, particularly when the Adelphi's limelight became sacred to William Terriss and Jessie Mill ward. For the Christmastide of 1885 they appeared in The Harbour Lights by Sims and Pettitt. Lieutenant Kingsley, of H.M.S. " Britannic ", and Dora Vane have nothing to disturb their happiness apart from the fate of her life-long companion, Lina — victim of a gay young squire who is murdered in circumstances that cause all three to be suspected in turn. Through this turmoil Lina falls from a cliff down which Kingsley climbs to the rescue : a " clever mechanical change " showed the whole descent and the arrival of the lifeboat with the perilous tide. Although a run of over 500 performances established this as a landmark among melodramas, it seemed to take less hold over old playgoers' memories than The Bells Of Haslemere, by Pettitt and Sydney Grundy, which opened at the Adelphi in July 1887. It was designed to exploit homesickness. William Terriss, hoodwinked, goes on business to America with forged greenbacks that he utters, and he is consequently wanted by the police. While hunted through the brakes and swamps of the Mississippi by bloodhounds, he comes across a very sick crook who recovers his health in order to turn Queen's evidence — but not before the villain has tried to drown his own wife in a mill-race from which Terriss rescues her.
Several naive tales left their mark on playgoer's memories because Terriss enacted them. Another was The Fatal Card, by Haddon Chambers and B. C. Stephenson, at the Adelphi in 1894, which begins in Colorado with an attempt to lynch a scoundrel who is rescued by the hero ; this links itself with the murder of a miserly banker in circumstances that seem to fasten the guilt on his son ; and all ends well when a villain is destroyed by an infernal machine which brings the walls of his laboratory tumbling about his ears. One Of The Best, by Seymour Hicks and George Edwardes, the Adelphi drama at the end of 1895, made Terriss undergo the military ceremony of degradation recently suffered by the innocent Captain Dreyfus as the climax of the greatest military scandal ever known until then. More interest was taken by the Press in the moral turpitude of the young-woman-in-love who was the real culprit when her political treachery, theft, burglary and perjury caused the hero to be publicly degraded. Early in 1897, at the height of his popularity, Terriss played Douglas Jerrold's Jack