After the audience had left the theatre, Livius handed me downstairs to a pit-box, saying, "I must now leave you to attend my poor, timid, young friend." The lamps and candles were all extinguished, when Elliston threw himself along the benches in the pit. Soon afterwards Livius came upon the stage, now lighted by a single lamp, conducting a very ill-favoured young lady in a shawl. She began to sing very scientifically, but her voice was not pleasing. Study had done much for her, while nature had been a niggard. Elliston appeared to be going to sleep, as soon as he had heard the first verse of a most barbarously long song; but, accidentally observing me, he climbed up to my box from the pit, making a noise, which altogether discouraged the poor young lady by this rude inattention to her melody. "Why do not you play harlequin?" said I. "I am too old," he replied: and then asked me how the farce went off. "Famously," I replied. "I see you know how to profit by my advice, and you made fewer faces. But you took a great liberty with the public, when you began scolding the audience, instead of minding what you were engaged in," I observed to him. "What business had that man to stick himself up there?" Elliston asked. "From sympathy! He was looking at a mountebank!" During the whole of this time, the poor young lady was exerting herself by the light of her solitary lamp, _à pure perte!_ "It is really unmanly," I observed, "to be so unfeelingly inattentive to a beginner, and one of the fair sex." "Oh!" whispered Elliston, "Livius wants to father all his old sweethearts on me, I believe. I do not allude to this lady," said he, laughing, "it would be a libel on herself, and on mankind, to doubt her respectability; but then she cannot sing, and what is worse, he is going to bring me up three or four more next week." Oh, _mon Dieu!_ it has just occurred to me, that to have told this story of Elliston and Livius, in due time, it ought not to have come in these eight years at soonest; and I must now go back with my Memoirs; but what does it signify to my readers, the story will do as well, and amuse as much now, as later on; and if this book meets due encouragement, I may write something afterwards, with infinitely more regularity. * * * * * "It is all settled," said Fanny to me, on the night before Mr. Dick's dinner-party, "and I am to be Mrs. Parker." "I hope you will be happy," said I; "but I wish you were married." "Why should poor Parker marry a woman with a ready-made family?" asked Fanny. I declined offering an opinion, fearing to do harm. Fanny was four years my senior, and possessed perhaps a larger portion of what is called common sense than myself. _Au reste_, the thing was settled between her and Parker, who were to proceed together to Portsmouth, where Colonel Parker's regiment was stationed, after they had passed a fortnight at Brighton.