This I learned aroused much laughter, the idea being that the remark had been one which I am supposed to make in private life, though I dare say I have never uttered anything remotely like it. “The fellow is quite impossible,” continued the spurious Oswald, with a doubtless rather clever imitation of Mr. Belknap-Jackson’s manner. “If he is killed, feed him to the goldfish and let one of the dogs read his part. We must get along with this play. Now, then. ‘Ah! why did I ever leave Boston where every one is nice and proper?’” To which his supposed mother replied with feigned emotion: “It was because of your father, my poor boy. Ah, what I had to endure through those years when he cursed and spoke disrespectfully of our city. ‘Scissors and white aprons,’ he would cry out, ‘Why is Boston?’ But I bore it all for your sake, and now you, too, are smoking--you will go the same way.” “But promise me, mother,” returns Oswald, “promise me if I ever get dusty in the garret, that Lord Algy here will tell me one of his funny wheezes and put me out of pain. You could not bear to hear me knocking Boston as poor father did. And I feel it coming--already my mother-in-law has bluffed me into admitting that Red Gap has a right to be on the same map with Boston if it’s a big map.” And this was the coarsely wretched buffoonery that refined people were expected to sit through! Yet worse followed, for at their climax, the mimic Oswald having gone quite off his head, the Hobbs person, still with the preposterous affectation of taking me off in speech and manner, was persuaded by the stricken mother to sing. “Sing that dear old plantation melody from London,” she cried, “so that my poor boy may know there are worse things than death.” And all this witless piffle because of a quite natural misunderstanding of mine. I have before referred to what I supposed was an American plantation melody which I had heard a black sing at Brighton, meaning one of the English blacks who colour themselves for the purpose, but on reciting the lines at an evening affair, when the American folksongs were under discussion, I was told that it could hardly have been written by an American at all, but doubtless by one of our own composers who had taken too little trouble with his facts. I mean to say, the song as I had it, betrayed misapprehensions both of a geographical and faunal nature, but I am certain that no one thought the worse of me for having been deceived, and I had supposed the thing forgotten. Yet now what did I hear but that a garbled version of this song had been supposedly sung by myself, the Hobbs person meantime mincing across the stage and gesturing with a monocle which he had somehow procured, the words being quite simply: