The cabman, who had evidently received directions in advance from the girl, jerked his reins, and the cab moved forward, turned, and rattled away, the horse at a brisk trot. Yorick speedily left the scene. At the next corner he met a policeman, to whom he said: “There's a man lying on the sidewalk back there by the church. I don't know whether he's drunk or not.” He was off before the officer could detain him. Bridges spent the night in a station-house, recovering from the effects of a fall, which the police attributed to drunkenness. Assuming that he had received his blows from some masculine relative or admirer of the girl, he gave a false account of the bruises when the next night he asked the manager for a few nights of rest and enabled his understudy to obtain a chance long coveted. The leading juvenile manifestly thought best not to attempt a renewal of a flirtation with a young woman who had so formidable a protector; and the girl herself, whatever became of her, addressed him no more epistles of adoration, or of any sort whatever. Yorick got from the stage manager permission to change his dressing-room. Thereafter he and Bridges maintained a mutual coolness, until one day the leading juvenile, warmed by cocktails, melted, and addressed the old man familiarly by his nickname. “Old fellow,” said Bridges, over a café table, “when I come to play Hamlet, I'll send for you to act Poor Yorick. You'd do it well. You're always best, you know, in parts that don't require you to come on the stage at all.” The old man smiled grimly and then shrugged his shoulders at this pleasantry. When he died the other day, he left a curious will, in which, after naming several insignificant legacies, he bequeathed his skull “to a so-called actor, one Charles Bridges, to be used by him in the graveyard scene when he shall have become able to play Hamlet,--if the skull be not disintegrated by that time.” XXIII. -- COINCIDENCE Max took us down into a German place into the bowels of the earth. It was a bit of Berlin transplanted to Philadelphia and thriving beneath a Teutonic eating-house. Imagine a great cellar, with stone floor, ornamented ceiling, massive rectangular pillars of brown wood, substantial tables, heavy mediaeval chairs, crossbeams bearing pictures of peasant girls and lettered with sentiments of good cheer in German, and walls covered with beer-mugs of every size and device. Scores of men sat talking at the tables, smoking, devouring sandwiches, upturning their mugs of beer over the capacious receptacles provided by nature. The mediaeval chairs appealed to the romanticism that lies beneath Breffny's satirical exterior; and when Max called our attention to the fact that the mugs of beer came through apertures from caves beneath the street, we were content. For the hour, the problem of human happiness was solved for us three by three foaming mugs, three sandwiches, and tobacco.