“Bravo, Bindo,” said Eastonville, “it would pay you to send the hat round to-night. Here’s a fiver, young ’un, to open the bank with, though why I should give it you passes my comprehension. A boy who can earn ten pounds a night at sixteen is a sight better off than I am. If you lose it, you’ll have to try the others. I’m pretty well cleared out. After all you’re detestable, Bindo. Just when we want you most, your voice will be gone, and you’ll have spoiled us for all other singing, precisely as the great Sarah has spoiled us for any acting but her own. If we could only forget and start fresh with each week, how nice and pleasant everything would be. I believe Nelly is right in ‘Cometh up,’ when she says that memory is often a cruel gift. No one would choose to remember a feeble show, or to spoil his enjoyment of average singing by a recollection of the best. Why are ‘Jack Sheppard’ and ‘Geneviève de Brabant’ practically withdrawn from the London stage? Because elderly playgoers cannot forget the days when Mrs. Keeley played ‘Jack,’ or when Emily Soldene and the Dolaro drew all Mayfair to Islington by the witchery of a serenade. But now for ‘A boy’s best friend’—we’re all in a domestic mood to-night—and then cards.” II Bindo was very docile as a rule, especially in the hands of those who loved and cared for him. But on some points he was obdurate as steel. For instance, I could never persuade him, try what I would, to invest his salary, nor could anything induce him to learn a profession against the day when his voice should fail him. Singing, he said, had come naturally to him; a good voice, a good ear, and a little training had done the trick; and he thought, or pretended to think, that the evil day, when it did come, would bring with it its own resource. “Sufficient unto the day is the _good_ thereof” was Bindo’s motto throughout. And it was impossible to teach him the value of money. He spent it royally on others, lavishly on himself. “Where have you been, Bindo?” I said to him one Monday, when he hadn’t turned up as usual on the previous afternoon. “Oh, I took Harry out of town. He’s been seedy, you know, and wanted change. So we went to Brighton.” “And you travelled first-class, and put up at the Bedford, and lost money to him at cards in the evening?” “You have hit it _exactly_, old man,” was the reply. I believe that most of his money went on Quixotic kindnesses of this sort. One night when I was with him at the Queen’s Hall (he liked to run round to me between his “turns” and criticise the show from the front) his salary for two nights went before it was earned to the first violin, a blind little snuff-powdered man, but Bindo’s very particular friend, because he had stumbled in getting down from the stage and damaged his instrument.