the work, and generously dividing the spoil; an arrangement which, with increased experience, appeared one-sided to Critchett, who abruptly dissolved the partnership, thereby making Tindal his enemy for life.

Horace declared no undue influence had been used to induce the fair Julia to play in his farce; but Tindal was incredulous, and poked his host in the ribs, and told him to mind what he was about, and was very jocular indeed.

The subject and the beer being simultaneously exhausted, the volatile Tindal rose to depart.

"You must send me a lot of orders, and I'll bring a phalanx of supporters," said Charley.

Horace had chivalrous notions of leaving the fate of his farce in the hands of the paying public; but Tindal declared such squeamishness to be absurd. The former, too, had no great faith in the proper conduct of the class of supporters Tindal was likely to bring; and he shuddered at the dreadful effect which would ensue if the "phalanx" was turned out for unruly behaviour. He ventured to impart his fears to Tindal, who seemed wounded at his friend imagining he would send in any but good men and true, trained to their work, and warranted not to applaud at the wrong place. After having relieved Horace's mind, Tindal still lingered. He again alluded to the boots, and was particularly droll about the napless state of his hat. Horace, fearing an encounter with Priscilla in the passage, hurried a loan into his visitor's hand, and felt considerably relieved when the front door closed upon him. Something told Horace he would find Priscilla in tears, and so he did. Horace was anxious to finish the evening amicably; but Priscilla had a most unfortunate way of saying disagreeable things at the wrong time. Her first remark on her husband's appearance was-

"How much did your friend borrow this time?"

This put an end to all pleasure for the evening; and Horace sat to his work with a heavy frown, whilst Priscilla sulked over her sewing.

More rehearsing and less worry, as the farce became smoother; but on Monday, when every thing was so perfect for the evening, the scene was declared unfinished. At this Giggley proposed that the piece should be put off; at which Mr. Girdlestone, who had come down from his sanctum to see the rehearsal, lost his temper, and was rude to Giggley; then Giggley was rude to Mr. Girdlestone; and the servile Slagg, siding with the management, got snubbed by both parties, much to the delight of Miss Pimlico, who tittered tremendously for some minutes, whilst the stage-manager went and bullied an unfortunate carpenter. Every thing had appeared settled and ready on Saturday; but on the Monday nobody seemed prepared with any thing. It was not until Girdlestone had administered a liberal verbal castigation all round, that the rehearsal was permitted to proceed, which it did in disjointed and unsatisfactory manner, every body being out of temper: Giggley in particular addressing all his remarks to his boots.

Horace made up his mind that the piece would be hooted at the finish, if indeed it ever would come to a finish, which was problematical, he thought. He was too nervous to say much to Miss Mellington even; and he did not keep the dinner waiting, for a wonder. Nothing, however, would persuade Priscilla that he had not been taking a hearty lunch, for he ate scarcely a mouthful, though he declared he was not a bit nervous. The long hours between the early dinner and the opening of the Criterion Theatre appeared endless to the excited Horace, who could not sit still, or read or write, or do any thing but walk up and down the room and look at his watch. Priscilla had flatly refused to go to see the piece, and Horace had not pressed her, for he was nervous about the result of the performance, and he dreaded his wife hearing the hisses. Priscilla kissed him when he left; but she said nothing kind about the farce. She regarded the prospect of popularity with very different feelings from her husband, and she stuck to her colours with obstinate determination. So Horace shrugged his shoulders and set off to the Criterion. Business recently had not been good at that establishment. The fact of the theatre being (at least so said the advertisement) "the best-ventilated in the world," may have accounted for the extreme coolness of the audience; for certainly Mr. Pendragon's new play, founded on classical models and several unclassical plots, had with the warm weather combined to "ventilate" the Criterion very effectively. A vitiated public presumed to call the composition dull, and dulness is the worst of all vices in a dramatist; playgoers, however much they may be preached to by stern purists, preferring to be amused to being sent to sleep. No one ever knew this better than Shakespeare, who wrote to please his audiences; and did please them, too, by means which, if employed by a dramatist of to-day, would bring down a torrent of virtuous horror upon the head of the luckless scribbler. So Girdlestone, whilst he concurred in the condemnation indulged in by dramatic alarmists (he was wedded to tradition, for he had been brought up to believe in it), was only too glad to come to an agreement with a muchabused but generally successful writer to construct him a drama which should at least possess the merit of being intelligible, whilst if the piece allowed of the introduction of one or two of those exciting "situations" which it was the habit of the day to term "sensational," Girdlestone was not the man, the author well knew, to be niggardly in carrying out his intentions. Looking, therefore, impatiently forward to the day when it should grow cooler, and the author should be ready with his piece, Girdlestone was obliged to carry on with his classical failure, deriving what consolation he could from the pages of those papers which praised him hugely for his excellent intentions. The performance of the long dreary play before Horace's trifle might operate either as an incentive to mirth, or by its exhaustive dulness it might so weary out the audience that even Giggley would not be able to extract a laugh from them. Slagg had kindly given it as his opinion in the morning that the latter would

be the case; and Horace walked up to the portico with a loudly beating heart and a very pale face. As he arrived at the doors, a printed bill caught his eye; it was pasted over the play-bill, and ran thus :

"Miss Julia Mellington having met with a severe accident this afternoon, the management respectfully request the indulgence of the public for Miss Clarence, who will read the part of Sally Swindleby in the new farce."

Horace held on to the arm of Charley Tindal, who came up at the moment, or he would certainly have fallen in a faint on the front steps of Mr. Girdlestone's theatre.

CHAPTER XVI.

FELICIA PENROSE PERFORMS HER TASK WELL.

LITTLE dreaming that he was followed and watched, Mr. Ledbitter strolled on quietly, amusing himself by looking in the shop-windows, and once pausing to refresh himself with a bottle of ginger-beer; for the evening was a little sultry, and Ledbitter was one of those sleek comfortable men who soon get warm. A pleasant little chat too had the valet with the foreign gentleman who served him; a very sallowfaced and unkempt foreign gentleman, with a pair of unsavoury-looking sleeves rolled up to the elbows of two not over-cleanly arms. An Italian foreign gentleman, to judge from his name over the door, and one who was evidently doing well in an uncongenial clime; for whilst Mr. Ledbitter calmly waited until the froth had settled down, and improved the moments by speaking a few Tuscan sentences with a most undeceptive and insular pronunciation, there was an uninterrupted flow of copper into the Italian till, and there was no rest for the arms in the cloudy shirt-sleeves. A casual customer would have imagined there was then nothing on the mind of the pleasant-looking little gentleman who paraded his little vocabulary with many smiles, and nodded at the fluent replies of the proprietor, as if he perfectly understood them. With a patronising but polite bow, the valet left the shop, humming an operatic air, and rather red-eyed from the effects of the ginger-beer's effervescence; and as he slightly quickened his pace, the veiled female with the black eyes, who had been suddenly attracted by a Punch a month old in the window of a coffee-shop opposite, slightly mended hers. Through unpleasant back-streets Mr. Ledbitter wended his way, his step a little faster now, and with no eyes for the cheap allurements of the small shops he passed. At length he turned into a street near Seven Dials, and the heart of the young woman in the veil beat loudly, for she had a horror of low life, and where on earth was Mr. Ledbitter going?

Such a wretched street: dirt and gin the presiding geniuses; misery every where; misery, grim and hollow-eyed, peering from open windows; misery making itself more miserable at bright bars of tawdry public

houses, where the swing-doors were held back to let in what air there was stirring and there was very little of it stirring in St. Giles's that sultry summer-night. Round the doors of the foul shops hung panting families who had wearied of their four bare walls, and found the noisy crowded street a trifle less choking than their wretched rooms. The poor human rats who lived in the cellars had come from their holes to breathe a draught of something scarcely so polluting as the fever atmosphere of their foul retreats; and here and there on the shaky roofs of their rickety houses, top-story dwellers had scrambled, and sat perched amongst the perilous chimney-pots, proud of their elevated position, but regretting there was no public-house upon the parapets. Where a bit of wall intervened between the shops or cellars, a row of half-fed indescribable men would sit, their feet stretched out upon the hot pavement; and wretched wan women, with scanty shawls pulled tightly over their shoulders, stood about at the corners of courts and narrow passages, conversing in a languid and dispirited manner, occasionally varying the monotony by trying to lure their husbands from the gin-palace, or snatching their poor pale children from beneath the wheels of some passing vehicle. How those seething swarms of infants were not daily decimated by the score was always a marvel to the stranger who found himself driven through the squalid playground by some adventurous cabman, pleased at the opportunity of demonstrating his knowledge of short-cuts. Here and there a hairy-capped bull-necked youth or two might be seen furtively glancing up and down the street as they talked in an undertone. There was a marvellous family likeness amongst these youths, which would have led a casual observer to imagine they were all related by closer ties than the broad freemasonry of crime. young burglars, waiting impatiently for the foggy nights of winter with its many chances for the footpad, now compelled to devote himself to the inglorious calling of pocket-picking, occasionally enlivened by a raid upon remote areas; shiny-haired, bright-eyed young thieves, lithe and slippery in their movements, saucy in the security of not being "wanted," and doing nigger-dances on the kerb beneath the very nose of the policeman. Many of the street denizens with dogs too-dogs of hideous aspect, with no thoughts of "play" about them; heavy-jowled brutes, with the marks of many battles on their dingy hides, and in some cases with tails and cars which manifested the artistic eccentricity of their owners: a babel of bad English and bad Irish and bad language generally; a sight to sicken the heart of any man who saw it for the first time.

On that particular organ in the breast of Mr. Ledbitter the sight did not produce that unpleasant effect. He had evidently been down the street very frequently; for he did not look about him, but walked straight on until he arrived at the shop of Mr. Cooney, dealer in rags, bones, metals, and in fact almost any thing. The atmosphere of the narrow street being foul enough in all conscience, Mr. Cooney was

doing his best to make it fouler by puffing great whiffs of the rankest tobacco-smoke at his opposite neighbour, who, not to be behindhand, was doing much the same thing over the way. Cooney was not the sort of man to feel the weather, for he was an unimpassioned reticent individual, who felt nothing but the dulness of trade, and when business was bad, Cooney would talk a little, only a little; when things were flourishing, Cooney was silent as night, speaking in monosyllables, and seldom venturing a sentence except under severe provocation, when his remarks were apt to be limited, but exceedingly strong. Like all men who are surly and say very little, Cooney was universally considered a wealthy man; and he was in the habit of fishing-up money from almost inaccessible parts of his clothing after many angular contortions and much grunting, for he kept no till, but was generally believed to have an immense account at a large bank, though the most intimate of his friends had never seen his cheque-book.

It

There were many ugly dwellers in that dreadful street and its surrounding courts, as indeed there are in most streets patrician or plebeian, and most courts English and foreign; but the palm of perfect hideousness was certainly the due of Cooney. He was a little man with a great head, with big protruding blue eyes, which were large enough to have plenty of expression, but which had none whatever beyond a kind of vacant dulness and fishy oblivion. Cooney's nose had been broken in boyhood, and was flat and buttonlike in shape; and Cooney's mouth was large and cruel, ugly enough when closed, but a terrible feature to contemplate when distended by an evil grin, on which occasions it would display a half-dozen or so of such enormous fangs that one involuntarily wondered if Cooney had been born with the regular dental allowance, and if so, where the remainder had found room. was probably a knowledge of his extreme ugliness that induced Cooney to neglect those ablutionary exercises which would have only served to expose his personal shortcomings in all the deformity of cleanliness. Cooney dirty was an unpleasant sight; but the most vivid imagination shrunk from the mental picture of Cooney clean. At the end of his very long arms were very long fingers tipped with very long nails, which he was accustomed to drum upon his counter during any bargain with a customer; and this habit of his he made serve him in lieu of conversation, of which he was very chary, many of his closest bargains having been concluded without a dozen words coming from his lips, but with a patter on the counter from his finger-nails like a dozen telegraph-clerks working all at once.

Cooney was not in one of his best tempers on the evening in question; for trade, enervated probably by the extreme heat, had been a little languid during the week, and the returns were considerably below the average. So Cooney puffed his pipe with surly rapidity, and he looked at his opposite neighbour askance scowlingly, and occasionally drummed with his finger-nails upon the side of his shop-door, and