violence being shown by any misguided members
of this company, from which I now part with
so much regret, I have ordered a policeman to
wait at the outer door. No, ladies and
gentlemen, do not let us degrade our sacred profession
in the eyes of a derisive seafaring population."

We received our miserable gains with sour
and mutinous faces. Bodgers swore worse than
the army in Flanders, or any other country.
As for myself, I was ready to sit down and cry,
and think of my wife and three children, whom
I had left in ancestral Pentonville buoyed up by
the most extravagant hopes.

Mr. Vallancey left the stage for a moment. He
returned with his hat on, and his umbrella under
his arm; he held in one hand a pair of dusty
trodden-down dancing pumps, thin as cheese-
parings, the ribbon bows blue with mould.
He advanced to Bodgers, and said in a solemn
husky voice,

"My dear friend, accept these shoes; they
were once worn by that immortal actor, George
Frederick Cooke, in whose footsteps you are
already treading. Take them, and be happy."

I was quite ashamed of Bodgers. He
disdained all appearance of gratitude, and flung
the immortal shoes of George Frederick Cooke
far into the pit.

"I want no remembrance," he shouted, in
his gross way, "of either you or any other
blackguard who doesn't pay the people he
employs. I shan't forget you, in a hurry, Jack
Vallancey; nor, I dare say, will any one here."

Our company had broken up like an iceberg
in summer. The theatre had been secretly sold
by Mr. Vallancey, who, the night of his farewell
speech, left for London with his wife and two
daughters. Two days from that time I was the
only member of the corps dramatique left in
Whitby. I subsisted for a week by reciting and
ventriloquising at a harmonic meeting.

One night, as I was leaving the house, a friend
of mine, named Hanson, a lawyer's clerk, said
to me:

"If you can write a good hand, Mortimer, and
would accept it, I could get you a place as
copying clerk at a lawyer's office in London. I've
a cousin there. He writes to me to come up
directly, as there is a vacancy at his governor's;
but I can't go. I have got accustomed to
Whitby, I like it, and I mean to settle here.
Will you go?"

I stammered my thanks, but hinted that I
had not quite money enough to carry me up.

"O, that shan't stop you," said the good little
fellow. "We've been good friends; I know
you'll get on, if not in one way, in another;
so I'll lend you enough to take you up to town.
Stay, I'll go directly and write a letter to Sam
Thelluson, and he'll make it all square. Return
the money, old fellow, when it is convenient.
Oh, you'll do. I see it in your eye. Time
and the tide wear out the roughest day.—
Shakespeare, eh?"

I obtained the situation at Messrs. Fox,
Shackle, and Leggit's, No. 103B, Ely-place,
Holborn, thanks, partly to my own impudence,
but still more to the eulogies heaped on me by
Gussy Hanson, who spoke of me as the wonder
of the Whitby legal world, his proof of my talent
being entirely drawn from his brilliant
imagination. I had, however, been once a year in a
lawyer's office at Canterbury, from which I had
run away to join a troop of strolling players.
I found Mr. Samuel Thelluson an excellent
fellow, rather idle, but sharp, full of fun, and an
intense admirer of the dramatic profession. He
was about eight-and-thirty, rather short, with a
face covered with hair up to his very eyes, a
long red nose, and a cunning droll pinched-up
face. A man, in short, whom no counsel could
browbeat and no witness humbug.

The head clerk, old Hill, was a little shrunken,
grey-haired man, very neat and precise in his old-
fashioned dress, a fanatic at business, punctual,
severe, with no thought but of business—a sort
of man who, if he had had a day's holiday, would
have taken home a book on Gavelkind to
annotate. He always wore a frilled shirt, drab
gaiters, and wide-brimmed hat. We got on very
well together, although he considered me a great
deal too fond of practical joking and theatricals.

The second clerk, Blakeney, Thelluson's
terror, took a dislike to me the moment he saw
me. He was a stout, white-faced, insolent-
looking fellow, who always dressed in black,
and dashed about from chambers to chambers
with feverish pomposity. He was the right
hand of Mr. Shackle, into whose favour he had
wormed himself, and was very jealous of
Thelluson, whose smallest peccadillo he delighted to
expose to the firm.

The partners are easily described. Mr. Fox
was a tall, thin man, cold, hard, stiff, silent, and
proud. Mr. Shackle was a jolly, lively, bustling
lawyer, always in court or running about with
papers under his arm; while Mr. Leggit, the
capitalist, was a mysterious, over-dressed man,
who hardly ever came near the place but once a
week or so, and then drove up to the door in a
handsome barouche full of ladies, on his way to
some horticultural fête. I believe he was the
son of the rich founder of the firm, who had
retired, and that Fox and Shackle had formerly
been only clerks. He was chairman of several
companies, and lived in great style somewhere
down near Dorking.

A good deal of this I gathered from Sam
Thelluson the first day of my engagement, as
he walked with me to my own door at
Pentonville. I felt rather nervous, for I dreaded the
reproaches of Bessy, and I dreaded still more
her disappointment when she found all my
ambition gone, and the budding Kemble reduced to
a mere lawyer's clerk. But she bore it very
well. She cried for joy to see me, so did the
children, and she told me (though, perhaps, she
put all this on) that though her hopes of my
success had been great, she really was glad,
after all, that I had got into a steady, quiet way
of life, where the salary, though low, was
certain—at all events, now we could see more of