His father had been a successful actor in the ’sixties, named Swanwick. Now there are two kinds of bad parents: the parent who looks upon a child as a machine capable of perfect rectitude if its moral principles are manufactured on a certain plan, and the parent whose only notion of a child is that it is a sort of toy sent by Providence for his amusement. Now it amused old Swanwick to see his little son imitating the manners behind the footlights, lounging at bars, patronising pretty girls, advising them as to their costumes, for the actresses soon discovered that it pleased his father to see him taken notice of, and pleasing old Swanwick went a long way towards success. It made all the difference between the smooth and the seamy side of theatrical life. Blind admiration for him, and his, was all that was necessary; but woe to any one who suggested an alteration in his arrangements. He would turn on his most favoured fair one the moment she overstepped the bounds with which his vanity entrenched him, saying, ‘Am I the stage manager of this theatre or are you, madam?’ This outburst would be followed by language unfit for publication, and days of sullen anger, the clouds only departing after the most complete self-humiliation of the offending one. Now old Swanwick loved his profession; he loved trotting along the Strand and turning in to ‘have a drink’ with all the cronies he met in his progress. He also loved racing. Whenever, by hook or by crook, he could escape rehearsals, which were much less intermittent in those days than now, off he would go with his friend Travers, to Newmarket, Epsom, Sandown, anywhere. Driving for choice, and making a day of it, getting back to the theatre in a state of robust hilarity, putting his head in a basin of cold water, and coming out ‘fresh as a daisy,’ as he put it--at any rate capable of giving a capital performance of the tender, good-hearted fellow he delighted in portraying. When he died, his friend Travers adopted the little orphan boy. He was a man of old family, and felt the necessity, which old Swanwick had ignored, of doing something more for the boy than sending him to a day-school. Accordingly he talked seriously to the small precocious person whom he had taken under his protection; told him he intended to make him his heir, and that to learn to keep up his position he must acquire some knowledge of the life led in the world on this side of the footlights. He spoke in a way which appealed to the lively imagination of the boy; and when he had stayed for a few months with Travers in his house in Piccadilly, and had been taken down to the place in Gloucestershire for the shooting season, he was completely prepared to ignore his previous experiences; and could treat them lightly as the excursions of a gentleman’s son into Bohemia. Travers got very fond of the boy as time went on, and by the time he was thirteen made up his mind to do his very best for him. He sent him