It was a rude lesson which these officers had received, but it fully accomplished its purpose, and from that day to this duelling has been almost unknown in the British army.
Supernumeraries on the stage, ordinarily called ‘supers,’ receive a small pay, but are not reckoned within the rôle of actors. They make up a crowd, when a crowd is wanted in the piece, and so on. Though viewed as a kind of nobodies, they cannot be done without, and managers need to take care not to give them offence.
These humble players have been aptly described as serfs of the stage, for whom there is no manumission. Let them work as hard as they will, play their parts as well as they may, their merits meet scant recognition either before or behind the curtain. For the wage of some threepence an hour, they have to submit to being bullied and badgered, and put to all manner of personal discomfort. Still, with a sense of inferiority, the super considers himself an actor. He treads but the lowest rung; but his foot _is_ on the theatrical ladder. The climbers above may superciliously ignore the connection; but he feels that he too is an actor, and sometimes asserts his fellowship; like the poverty-stricken fellow who publicly hailed David Garrick as his ‘dear colleague,’ on the score that it was his crowing that made the ghost of buried Denmark start like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons; and the less obtrusive super who, when told of Macready’s death, exclaimed: ‘Ah! another of us gone!’
It is recorded that a French super playing an assistant-footman in a popular _opéra-bouffe_ for the first time, fell down in a fit, brought on by the excitement consequent upon his having to ‘create the rôle.’ Too much zeal is always inconvenient. At a performance not very long since of _Richard III._, the armies contending at Bosworth were so carried away by professional ardour that the mimic fray came very near the real thing; and one gallant archer introduced himself to the manager’s notice with an arrow through his nose, so astonishing that gentleman that he salved the wound with half a sovereign. The next evening the casualties rose to such alarming proportions, that a like treatment would have well-nigh exhausted the treasury.