The imposing red facade of Madame Tussaud's in Marylebone Road must give the foreigner a totally false impression of English taste in amusement; for the exhibition does not really bear the intimate relation to the city that its size might lead one to expect. Who goes to Madame Tussaud's I cannot say. All I know is that whenever I have asked friends and acquaintances of my own (as I have been doing lately) if they have been, they reply in the negative, or date their only visit many years ago. I wonder if men of eminence steal in now and then to see what their effigies are like and what notice they are drawing, as painters are said to lurk in the vicinity of their canvases at the Royal Academy to pick up crumbs of comfort. I wonder if Mr. Kipling has ever seen the demure figure that smirks beneath his name; I wonder if the late Dr. Barnardo really wore, "in the form," as the spiritualists say, a collar such as he wears in his waxen representation? There is hardly a figure in this exhibition that conveys any illusion of life. Their complexions are not right; their hair is not right. Their clothes are obviously the clothes of the inanimate; they have no notion what to do with their bands.

Thinking it over, I have come to the conclusion that not only the unreality, but also the eeriness, almost fearsomeness, of a waxwork, reside principally in its clothes. A naked waxwork, though unpleasant, would not be so bad: it is the clothes wanting life to vivify and justify it that make it so terrible, just as clothes on a corpse add to the horror of death. One wonders where the clothes come from. Do they also, like the features and hair of these figures, approximate to life, or are they chosen at random? Mr. Burns, it is well known, relinquished one of his blue serge suits in exchange for a new one; but the others? Lord Balfour, for example? Are there underclothes too? Does the Tussaud establishment include a tailor and a modiste? To these questions I could no doubt obtain a satisfactory reply by merely writing to the exhibition; but there are occasions when it is more amusing to remain in the domain of conjecture. This is one.

I wandered into Madame Tussaud's a little while ago entirely for the purpose of saying something about it in this book. As it was a foggy day, I had some difficulty in disentangling the visitors from the effigies ; but when I did so I saw that they wore a provincial air. I felt a little provincial myself as I passed from figure to figure and turned to the catalogue to see if I were looking at the late Daniel Leno or Mr. Asquith.

The Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's is London's Cabaret des Neants, London's Wiertz Museum. Horrors are not encouraged in England, and London has no other official collection of them, if we except the assemblage of articles of crime that Scotland Yard cherishes. But jemmies and pistols and knives are not in themselves horrors, whereas wax decapitated heads dropping blood, coloured pictures of diseases, models of criminals being tortured, a hangman and a condemned man on the scaffold these exist by virtue of their horrifying power, and you are asked for an extra sixpence frankly as a payment for shudders.

It is all ugly and coarse, and in part very silly, as when you are confronted by a dock crammed with effigies of the more notorious murderers (the only really interesting murderers, of course, being those who have escaped detection or even suspicion: but how should Madame Tussaud's patrons know this?) all blooming with the ruddy tints of health. But one must not wholly deprecate. In the other scale must be put some of the work of Madame Tussaud herself her Voltaire, which is to me one of the most interesting things in London, as his life mask at the Carnavalet is one of the most interesting things in Paris ; a few of her other heads belonging to the Reign of Terror, notably the Robespierre; the very guillotine that shed so much of France's best and bravest blood; and the relics of Napoleon. We must remember too that it is very easy and very tempting to be more considerate for the feelings of children than is necessary. Children have a beautiful gift of extracting pure gold from baser material without a stain of the alloy remaining upon them; and we are apt to forget this in our adult fulminations against vulgarity and ugliness. For children Madame Tussaud's will always be one of the ante-rooms to the earthly paradise, whether they go or not. The name has a. magic that nothing can destroy. And though they should not, if I were taking them, ever set foot in the subterranean Temple of Turpitude, they would, I have very good reason to know, come away from the study of kings and queens of England, and the historical tableaux the finding of Harold's body, and the burning of the cakes by Alfred the Great, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the death of Becket, the signing of Magna Charta and other scenes in "Little Arthur" with a far more vivid idea of English history and interest in it than any schoolmaster or governess could give them. And that is a great thing.

None the less, not willingly do these footsteps wander that way again; and I would sooner be the chairman of the Society for Psychical Research's committee for the investigation of haunted houses than spend the night among these silent, stony-eyed mockeries of humanity. Surely they move a little at night. Very slowly, I am sure, very cautiously. . . . You would hear the low grinding sound of two glass eyes being painfully brought into focus.

I could go mad in a waxwork exhibition. Once I nearly did. It was in the Edgware Road, and the admission fee was a penny. A small shop and house had been taken and filled with figures, mostly murderers. The place was badly lit, and by the time I had reached the top floor and had run into a poisoner, Mrs. Hogg and Percy Lefroy Mapleton, I was totally unhinged.