with effusions of a similar tendency, every day resounded from their theatrical cellar, followed by bursts of thoughtless merriment and laughter. One day our little cellar company were engaged in rehearsing Dibdin’s comic opera of the Padlock. Being the best singer, Hodgkinson had the part of Leander allotted to him, sore against his will, Mungo being at that time his favourite character. As he played the first fiddle he was employed in scratching away an accompaniment to the Mungo of the day, in the song of Dear heart, dear heart, what a terrible life am I led, when a noise was heard at the door of a passage that led to the cellar, as if it were a person pushing against it. Interrupted thus unseasonably, master Mungo, in apparent panic, suddenly ceased to sing. “What do you stop for?” said John. “Didst thou not hear a noise?” said the other, assuming the tone, and perhaps feeling the alarm too, of Macbeth, in the dagger-scene. “Bravo, bravo!” cried Hodgkinson, “excellent! You can’t do Mungo half so well. It is I, sir, I that can do Mungo to the very life. Now I say, boys, with what feeling could I pour out from my heart and soul, “Oh cussa heart of my old massa--him damn impudence and his cuss assurance.” This he followed with a spirited twang of “Dear heart” on the violin, accompanying it with the words. Again a noise was heard. “What can it be?” said one. “What can it be?” said another. There was a push at the door. “Oh!” cried Hodgkinson, “it’s only one of the hogs that roam about the alley, who, having more taste than the _old ones_, is come to hear our mirth and music.” At this moment the door was burst open, and John’s master entered. Before the latter had time to speak, or John to reflect, the boy’s wit got the better of his prudence, and he roared out, in the words of Hamlet, “Oh my prophetic spirit! did I not tell you that it was a hog?” Hitherto the master had never gone so far as to strike him; but now, enraged beyond all control at what he saw and heard, he struck the boy with his fist in the face, wrung the fiddle out of his hand, and smashed it to pieces on his head. John, who could run like a greyhound, and well knew how far he could trust to his heels, no sooner got out of the cellar than he let loose the floodgates of his wrath, and poured forth upon his astonished master a torrent of invective, partly the slang of the mob, and partly supplied from plays and farces by his memory; then assuring “the ugly illnatured hunks” that he never should see him again till he was able to make his thick scull ring with a drubbing, he disappeared, and prepared to leave Manchester.