Here the interest begins; three or four foot-stamps are heard behind; _Jack_ starts--"Ah, that noise," &c.--and on comes the author of the piece, "his first appearance here these five years." He approaches the foot-lights--he turns up his eyes--he thumps his breast--and goes through this exercise three or four times, before the audience understand that they are to applaud. They do so; and the play goes on as if nothing had happened; for this is an episode expressive of a "first appearance these five years." _Gipsy George_ or Mr. G. Almar, whichever you please, having assured _Jack Ketch_ that he is starving and in utter destitution, proceeds to give five shillings for a piece of rope, and walks away, after taking great pains to assure everybody that he is going to hang himself. Before, however, he has had time to make the first coil of a hempen collar, _Jack_ looks off, and descries the stranger in the last agonies of strangulation, amidst the most deafening applause from the audience, whose disgust is indignantly expressed by silence when he exits to cut the man down. Their delight is only revived by the apparition of _Gipsy George_, pale and ghastly, _with the rope round his neck_, and the exclamation that he is "done for." _Barabbas_, the hangman, who re-appears with the rest, is upbraided by _Jack_ for coolly looking on and letting the man hang himself, without raising an alarm. Mr. B. answers, that "it was no business of his." Like Sir Robert Peel and the rest of the profession, it was evidently his maxim not to interfere, unless "regularly called in." The _Gipsy_, so far from dying, recovers sufficiently to make to _Jack_ some important disclosures; but of that mysterious kind peculiar to melodrama, by which nobody is the wiser. They, however, bear reference to _Jack's_ deceased father, a clasp-knife, a certain _Sir Gregory_ of "the gash," and the four gentlemen so recently suspended at Execution-Dock.