At all events, Hugh Colville felt strongly that until he had seen a clown he had been ignorant of the real dignity of human nature, or the sublime heights to which, properly cultivated, it was capable of soaring. Columbine also (as enacted by that houri, Rosetta Matilda Slammock) impressed him with a deep sense of the sylph-like grace and ethereal purity of woman,--all but the very pink calves of her seraphic legs, in regard to which, beautiful and praiseworthy as they were, viewing them in the abstract as mere bounding, pirouetting, sliding, and gliding machines, he could not help indulging some scruples of conscience, mentally classing them with unpaid-for toffy, clandestine nine-pins on Sunday, and the few other examples of the “pleasant, but wrong” principle, which had come within the limits of his juvenile experience; and he was just considering that, if Heaven had vouchsafed to place him in the proud and enviable position of her elder brother, he should have mildly remonstrated against her making such a very prominent feature of her legs; when to his surprise and regret, Virtue suddenly triumphed amidst ablaze of fireworks, and Vice being punished in the person of the Lurid Wizard of the Forty-locked Murderer’s Cavern, who was dragged by three supernumerary fiends-to a naughty place under the stage, the curtain fell, and all was over. The next phase of the evening was to Hugh one strange and uncomfortable scene of inexplicable confusion. Biggington, Norman, and his companions, went behind the scenes, under the auspices of Jack Sprattly, who did not look nearly so brave and glorious out of his scarlet coat; and Hugh followed them for fear of being lost, receiving at their hands much the same kind and degree of attention that a little dog would have met with. Of all miserable, desolate, chaotic-looking places, the stage of a theatre in _dishabille_ is one of the most forlorn. The incomprehensible machinery for scene-shifting, the frightful backs of all the brilliant effects, the dirt, the smell of the lamps, the ropes, the rubbish, the dangerous trap-doors, the tired, sleepy carpenters, the haggard, snobbish actors, and, worse than all, the pale, hollow-eyed actresses, with their forced, heartless laughter--a very mockery of mirth--of all places for destroying illusion, commend me to the region behind the-scenes as the most dismally effectual. Biggington, Norman, and Stradwick, having disappeared somewhere within the mysterious precincts of the green-room where they remained long enough for Terry to jump over everything, and tumble down everywhere, and set wrong bells ringing in all kinds of unexpected places, and have a terrific combat with nobody in virtue of a “property” sword and buckler wherewith he had illegally armed himself--the party re-assembled, and without further delay proceeded to “The Bull.”