And now I was faced with my first great critical task for Mr. Bulger, and secretly I viewed it with great nervousness, though openly to Brightwin I approached the test in a jaunty spirit. Needless to say I had taken preliminary steps, and the greatest of these was to hire a dress suit. At this stage in my career, unfortunately, to buy a dress suit presented insuperable difficulties; but I found from fellow-pupils at the Dramatic School that one might hire for a merely nominal sum. So I hired, and had a dress rehearsal of the part I was to play at Clapham Assembly Room, in which my Aunt Augusta and her servant, Jane, constituted the audience. Then came the important night. I returned home direct from the office, partook of a slight repast, and reached the Clapham Assembly Room three-quarters of an hour before the doors opened. This was rather feeble in a way, and not worthy of Mr. Bulger, or _Thespis_, because we all know that professional critics dash up at the last moment in their private broughams and sink into a sumptuous stall just as the curtain rises on new productions. But I had come, as a matter of fact, in a tram and was far too early. A sense of propriety, however, told me that I ought not to be there—skulking about at least an hour before I need be; and so, with a fair amount of presence of mind, I started off to take a look at Clapham, which was a district quite unknown to me. I decided with myself that nothing would make me return to the Assembly Room until ten minutes before the curtain actually rose. I should then lounge in, present my ticket, and appear with a bored and weary air among my fellow-critics. But as all roads were said by the ancients to lead to Rome, so all roads at Clapham appear to lead to the Assembly Room. I walked away again and again and kept going in directions that seemed to point exactly opposite from the Assembly Room, yet, sooner or later, I invariably found myself back in the same old spot. The exterior of this edifice was of an unattractive architecture, and not until two minutes before the doors opened did people begin to collect in front of it. After being, as it were, the hero of a hundred first nights in London, this audience at Clapham appeared piffling; but as the performance was for a charitable institution, many came actuated by philanthropic emotions and, of course, in a perfectly uncritical spirit. I, however, being there in the course of business, felt that I must not let any considerations of the charitable institution come between me and my duty. The moment arrived, and I entered and presented my ticket with an air of patient and long-suffering indifference. “Press!” said the man in the ticket-office, and marked a number on my ticket and handed it to another man. It was distinctly a moment to remember, and I forgot my hired clothes and everything, but just felt that I stood there as a representative of that glorious institution—the London Press!