‘To return to my story; my late partner found himself in much the same fix as myself, and this discovery paved the way for a mutual friend to bridge over the gulf that had kept us apart. As soon as we had agreed to work together again, we got a twelve nights’ engagement at the Prince of Wales concert-hall at Wolverhampton. We found the other professionals engaged there very good people to pal with, and spent Christmas Day with the comic singer and his wife, two niggers also being of the party, and bringing their banjo and bones to promote its hilarity. While we were in Wolverhampton, we arranged for twelve nights, to follow, at the London Museum music-hall at Birmingham, which has received its name from the cases of stuffed birds and small animals of all kinds, which cover all the wall space of the front of the bar and the passage leading to the hall. After our twelve nights there, we were engaged for six nights longer; and then we went down to Oldham, for a twelve nights’ engagement at the Co-operative Hall. For all these engagements, and for all we made afterwards, the terms we obtained were four pounds ten a week. ‘Our next engagement was with a circus in Dublin, to which city we crossed from Liverpool. The company and stud of this concern were very different in strength and quality to Newsome’s, and they were doing very poor business. It is very seldom that a circus proprietor ventures upon the experiment of an Irish tour, which more rarely pays, both because of the poverty of the people, and the difficulty which all caterers for their amusement find in avoiding grounds for manifestations of national antipathies between English and Irish. Of this we had an instance on the first night of our engagement. I dare say you have heard Sam Collins or Harry Baker, or some other Irish _comique_, interlard a song with a spoken flourish about the Irish, something after this fashion:—“Who was it made the French run at Waterloo? The Irish! Who won all the battles in the Crimea? The Irish! Who put down the rebellion in India? The Irish! Who mans your men of war and recruits your army? The Irish! Who builds all your houses and churches? The Irish! Who builds your prisons and your workhouses? The Irish! And who fills them? The Irish!” In England this is laughed at, even by the Irish themselves; but in Ireland nothing of the kind is tolerated. One of the clowns delivered himself of this stuff in the ring, and was warmly applauded until the anticlimax was reached, when such a howl burst forth as I shouldn’t have thought the human voice could utter. The fellows in the gallery jumped up, and raved, stamped, gesticulated, as if they were Ojibbeways performing a war-dance; and everybody expected that the seats would be pulled up, and flung into the ring, as had been done in another circus, under something similar circumstances, some time before. But the storm was hushed as suddenly as it arose. It happened fortunately that our performance was