I gazed about me with troubled and lack-lustre eye. Every lorgnette in the boxes was levelled at my miserable countenance; a sea of upturned and derisive faces grinned at me from the pit, and the gods in Olympus thundered from on high--"Turn him out; he's drunk!" This was the unkindest cut of all--thus publicly to be accused of intoxication, a vice of all others I have ever detested and eschewed. I cast one indignant glance around me, and left the theatre, lamenting the depravity of our nature, which is, alas! always ready to put the worst construction upon actions in themselves most innocent; for if I had gone to sleep in my own arm-chair, pray who would have accused me of inebriety? How I got home I know not. As I hurried through the streets, a legion of voices, in every variety of intonation, yelled in my ears--"Turn him out--he's drunk!" and when I woke in the middle of the night, tormented by a raging thirst (produced, I suppose, by the flurry of spirits I had undergone), I seemed to hear screams, groans, and hisses, above all which predominated loud and clear the malignant denunciation--"Turn him out--he's drunk!" Upon my subsequently mentioning the above adventure to Jack Withers, it will hardly be credited that this villain without shame at once roundly asserted that, when I left him on the afore-mentioned night, I was at least three sheets and three quarters in the wind; adding with praiseworthy candour, that he himself was so far gone as to be obliged, to the infinite scandal of his staid old housekeeper, to creep up stairs _a quatre pieds_, in order to gain his bedroom. Now this latter may be true enough, for it is probable that friend Jack freshened his nip a trifle after my departure, seeing that he was always something of a drunken knave. As for his calumnious and scandalous declaration, that _I_ was in the least degree tipsy, it is too ridiculous to be noticed. I scorn it with my heels--I was sober--sober, cool, and steady as the north star; and he that is inclined to question this solemn asseveration, let him send me his card; and if I don't drill a hole in his doublet before he's forty-eight hours older, then, as honest Slender has it, "I would I might never come in mine own great chamber again else." * * * * * "ARE YE SURE THE NEWS IS TRUE?"