“No, no!” cried Triplet, with tears in his eyes. “It is I who have been rough and brutal. Poverty tried us too hard; but we were not like the rest of them--we were always faithful to the altar. And the Almighty has seen us, though we often doubted it.” “I never doubted that, James.” So then the poor things fell on their knees upon the public road, and thanked God. If any man had seen them, he would have said they were mad. Yet madder things are done every day by gentlemen with faces as grave as the parish bull's. And then they rose and formed their little plans. Triplet was for devoting four-fifths to charity, and living like a prince on the remainder. But Mrs. Triplet thought the poor were entitled to no more than two-thirds, and they themselves ought to bask in a third, to make up for what they had gone through; and then suddenly she sighed, and burst into tears. “Lucy! Lucy!” sobbed she. Yes, reader, God had taken little Lucy! And her mother cried to think all this wealth and comfort had come too late for her darling child. “Do not cry. Lucy is richer, a thousand times, than you are, with your twenty thousand pounds.” Their good resolutions were carried out, for a wonder. Triplet lived for years, the benefactor of all the loose fish that swim in and round theaters; and, indeed, the unfortunate seldom appealed to him in vain. He now predominated over the arts, instead of climbing them. In his latter day he became an oracle, as far as the science of acting was concerned; and, what is far more rare, he really got to know _something_ about it. This was owing to two circumstances: first, he ceased to run blindfold in a groove behind the scenes; second, he became a frequenter of the first row of the pit, and that is where the whole critic, and two-thirds of the true actor, is made. On one point, to his dying day, his feelings guided his judgment. He never could see an actress equal to his Woffington. Mrs. Abington was grace personified, but so was Woffington, said the old man: and Abington's voice is thin, Woffington's was sweet and mellow. When Jordan rose, with her voice of honey, her dewy freshness, and her heavenly laugh, that melted in along with her words, like the gold in the quartz, Triplet was obliged to own her the goddess of beautiful gayety; but still he had the last word: “Woffington was all _she_ is, except her figure. Woffington was a Hebe; your Nell Jordan is little better than a dowdy.”