Respectability is all very well for folks who can have it for ready money; but to be obliged to run in debt for it--oh, it’s enough to break the heart of an angel. Well, I’ve gone a good round, and it’s nothing but right that I should be comfortable at last. Wasn’t all the sweetness of my little boyhood lost in an attorney’s office? At a time of life when I ought to have been bird’s-nesting, shoeing cats with walnut-shells, spinning cock-chafers on pins, and enjoying myself like any other child of my age--there I was half the day wearing out a wooden desk with my young breast-bone, and the other half running about, like a young cannibal, to serve writs: sneaking and shuffling, and lying worse than any playbill, and feeling as happy as a devil’s imp on a holiday whenever I “served” my man. Yes, Peter, that I’ve any more heart than an oyster left me, is a special favour of Providence; for what a varmint I was! If it hadn’t been for the playhouse, I should have been ruined. Yes, Peter, but for the Coburg Theatre, I have no doubt that at this time I should have been a sharp attorney, not able to smell as much as a lucifer-match without the horrors. ’Tis a great place for morals, the playhouse, Peter. As I say, it quite drew me back into the paths of virtue. Old Simcox, my master, to keep me active, used to give me a shilling for every writ I served. He used to say there was nothing like rubbing a young dog’s nose in the blood, to make him sharp after the game. Well, with these shillings I used to go to the Coburg gallery. That gallery was my salvation. When I used to see the villain, who’d been so lucky all through the piece, chopped down like chopped wood at the last, my conscience used to stir worse than the stomach-ache. And so by degrees I liked the playhouse more, and the writs less. And one day when Simcox told me to go and serve a writ upon the very actor who used to do me so much good--for he was always the cock of the walk as far as virtue went--I gave him such a speech about “tremble, villain, for there is an eye,” that the old fellow gasped again. When he had recovered himself enough to fling a ruler at my head, I put on my cap and turned my back upon the law. After this, I sold playbills at the Coburg doors, and that ’s how I picked up the deal I know about the stage.