And after a pursuit very vividly pantomimed, the little stranger is suffered to be caught, and to tell the catcher that it is his father’s ghost, doomed for a season to walk the earth and nip him most infernally, and so on. Now I am sure that every one in the room has heard this dozens of times before, yet old men are laughing as if it was an absolute novelty. Talk about alcohol brightening men’s intellects! When I come to such places as this, it always seems to me to have a precisely contrary effect. Men could not sit and hear all these stale witticisms unless they drank. Sober, I am sure they could not do it, not even if they were paid for it; and yet all seem enraptured. I remark, however, one exception. Two waiters help to a seat by my side a very dirty little man with red eyes, and generally shabby appearance. The waiters set down by him a glass of grog, offer him a cigar, and then playfully shaking their fingers at him, as if to intimate he had better be quiet, leave him to his fate. After a few minutes of deep thought, he looks to me and beckons. I take no notice. He repeats the signal. I lean forward. “Very o-old, sir.” “What do you mean?” we ask. “The comic singer very o-old, sir.” We intimate as much. “But get him on a fresh piece, sir, and see how he can go-o.” Here our friend began rolling one arm rapidly round the other, to give us an idea of the comic singer’s powers. “Pity he don’t give something new,” repeats our friend. Another assenting nod on our part and the conversation ceases. But we suppose it is with comic singers as with others. “A man who has settled his opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his convictions disturbed,” wrote Dr Johnson, and a comic singer does not like to have the bother of learning fresh songs. But the comic singer was applauded and encored, and then he treated us to a monologue, in which he describes how he, the drunken husband, stays out all night, and makes it up with his “old ooman” when he gets home; and in the course of his remarks of course he declares teetotalism is humbug, that there was truth in wine, but he’d be blessed if there was any in water; that the man who would drink the latter would be a muddy cistern—forgetting all the while the _tu quoque_ the water-drinkers would very fairly urge, on the authority even of Mr Henry Drummond; and then I came away, thinking that if drinking made men witty and light-hearted, I had been very unfortunate on the night of my visit. Once upon a time, as the writer was in the Cave of Harmony, the polite manager asked him his opinion of a new comic singer. Having given it, the red-faced little man turned to us with a sigh, and said, “Ah, sir, you have no idea what a dearth there is of comic talent now-a-days.” And truly he was right. There is little fun and comedy and wit anywhere. I know not where they are; I know where they are not. You will not find them in the taverns where men sit all