usually drunk, and what I mistook for homage was in reality the treatment that only a contemptible drunkard with money, such as I, ever gets. Every scene-shifter had a harrowing tale, or an imaginary subscription list, to all of whom I administered bounteous monetary consolation; and any varlet with a whole hand, and a greasy rag round it, at once received a ‘fiver’ as a mark of sympathy for his painful accident. In short, I was a fool, looked on as only fit to be fleeced, and simply tolerated for the sake of my money. Would to God I had confined myself to these contemptible but otherwise harmless follies! “It was on a dull foggy night—a night I can never forget—that some half-dozen of my boon companions had been dining with me at a celebrated restaurant. The _débris_ of the dessert had not been removed, and they were sipping their coffee whilst I was settling the bill, when a suggestion was made that we should go to the ‘Sussex.’ The ‘Sussex’ was a very disreputable theatre, situated somewhere over the water, and supported entirely by the lowest classes and a few golden calves, such as myself, who were serving their apprenticeship, and who were permitted the inestimable privilege of going behind the scenes—entering the green-room, or indeed any room, and paying ten shillings a bottle for as much fluid of an effervescent nature in champagne bottles as anybody and everybody chose to call for. On these occasions we were ushered into the sacred precincts, with a certain amount of implied caution similar to and about as necessary as that assumed by a ragamuffin in the streets when asking you to buy a spurious edition of the _Fruits of Philosophy_. This, however, in my ignorance, only enhanced the pleasure. We were, as I believed, participating in some illegal transaction, permitted only to the most fortunate. As a fact, we were violating no law; and if the Lord Chamberlain did not object, Scotland Yard certainly didn’t. Etiquette on these occasions demanded that we should be formally introduced to the various ‘ladies’ that frequented the green-room—a custom I considered highly commendable, for in my ignorance I believed that not the slightest difference existed between the highest exponent of tragedy and the frowsiest ballet-girl in worsted tights and spangles.