It was the twelfth of May of that year when we set sail down the Adriatic, and I had never seen anything so heavenly beautiful as the coast and sea. We were five days on our journey; and now, when I have travelled the wide world over, have seen most of its show places, and have made myself familiar with exotic beauties of the landscape and seascape sort, I can recall nothing like that five days' dream of heaven. Perhaps the fact that I was going to look at war for the first time, and had some premonition of its horrors, made the placid loveliness of the Mediterranean more charming and exquisite by a kind of foreseen contrast. But I do not remember to have beheld (and I do not think I shall fail to remember it all till the day I die) anything so beautiful as the far-off islands that lifted their purple heads as we steamed through the Piraeus, and the long-drawn wonderful panoramic splendours of the Mediterranean sunsets. I have travelled in many ships since then, and have never missed the inevitable fool. There is always a fool aboard ship; and I remember one day when we were within sight of Corfu that the fool who was our local property for the moment touched me on the shoulder as I hung over the bows, and pointed to the island.

'They say that's land,' said he, 'but you d think it was a sweetmeat. Looks good to eat, doesn't it? It's like them biled violet things in sugar that they sell in Paris.'

I was all on fire to see the interior of my first Eastern city, and when I saw the domes and minarets of Constantinople actually before me, the traveller's instinct was quickened to a passion. We got in at sundown, and behind the picturesque roofs of the town lay an amber and crimson mystery of light, which was half-obscured by the smoke and steam of a score or two of vessels. The whole scene looked like a smeared landscape from the hand of Turner. He, at least, would have seen to it that the colour was clear; but Nature is very often behind the artist, and the effect was grossly muddy and untransparent.

In common with the rest of the world I had heard of baksheesh, but until then I never understood its magic power. A huge functionary took charge of my trunk and portmanteau, and impounded them so decisively in the name of the law that I had made up my mind to see neither of them any more. The captain of the boat whispered in my ear that a mejidieh would do it, I tried a French five-franc piece! which proved instantly efficacious; and a minute or two later I was on shore at Galata, astride a donkey whose tail was industriously twisted round by his driver, and who was followed by an unequally laden brother ass, who bore my portmanteau on one flank and my trunk upon another.

We scrambled up the stony road towards the main street of Pera. The city had looked like a Turneresque dream from the outside, but known from within it was the home of ugliness, and of stinks innumerable. The yellow dogs tripped the feet as often as the abominable pavement, and seemed as immovable and as much a part of the road itself. Now and again in the side streets a whole horde howled like a phalanx of advancing wolves; but they were outside the parish of the brutes who encumbered the roadway I had to travel, and though the noise of war was near, the canine regiment not actually called to fight rested immobile, its members suffering themselves to be kicked by foot passengers, trodden on by cattle, and rolled over by wheels with an astonishing stolidity.

We reached the hotel in time for an admirable dinner—the precursor of many admirable meals, whose only fault was that they were built too much on one pattern. We were served, as I recall too well, with tomato soup, red mullet, quail, tomato farcie, and cutlet. Next morning at breakfast came red mullet, quail, and tomato farcie. At luncheon came red mullet, quail, tomato farcie, and cutlet At dinner came tomato soup, red mullet, tomato farcie, quail, and cutlet. It was a charming menu—for once: but when we had gone on with it for a week my travelling companions and myself grew a little weary of it, and would fain have found a change. Poor Campbell—Schipka Campbell we called him afterwards—had arrived with an earlier boatload of adventurers and was staying at the Hotel de Misserie. Captain Tiburce Morrisot, of the Troisieme Chasseurs, stayed at the Byzance; and we three made a party together to dine at Valori's and to escape the eternal red mullet, tomato farcie, and quail.

We found there an astonishing German waiter who seemed, more or less, to speak every language under heaven. There were in the cafe Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Turks, Bulgars, Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, and people, for aught I know, of half a dozen other nationalities; and the head waiter addressed each and all of these in turn in any language which might be addressed to him. One of us asked him with how many tongues he was familiar, and he answered, with an apologetic aspect, 'Onily twelf.' What could we have for dinner? 'Fery good dinner, gentlemen. There is red mullet, there is tomato farcie, there is qvail,' We elected finally to dine on something which was announced as roast beef and looked suspiciously like horse. Anything was better than that eternal round of delicacies which had grown to be so tiresome. The city was in a state of siege, and every ramble along the street was productive of interest and amusement—sometimes of a rather striking sort. I had only been there some three or four days when, in the course of a morning stroll, I found myself in front of the Wallach Serai. The footpaths were lined pretty thickly with loungers who had stood to watch the march-past of a regiment of Zeibecks. The bare-legged ruffians, with their amazing beehive hats and their swagging belly-bands crammed with the antique weapons with which their ancestors had stormed Genoa, straggled past in any kind of order they chose to adopt and made their way towards the Sweet Waters of Europe, by whose shores they were destined to encamp. When they were all gone and the stagnant tide of passage was revived there came by an old Hoja, a holy man, dressed in green robe and caftan and wearing yellow slippers—self-proclaimed as one who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was followed by a very small donkey laden with panniers. By my side on the footwalk stood a Circassian who had been flourishing in the air, whilst the troops went by, a formidable-looking yataghan, and had been cheering in some language of which I did not understand a syllable.

This man was now standing, with an admiring crowd about him, licking the back of his wrist and shaving off the hair that grew there by way of showing the edge and temper of his weapon. It must have been set as finely as a razor, and, like a razor, it was broad-backed and finely bevelled. Just as the old Hoja went by, and the placid little donkey followed at his heels, the Circassian stepped into the horse-road, gave the weapon a braggadocio swing, and at a single blow divided the head of the poor little ass from the body as cleanly as any dandy swordsman of the Guards will sever a hanging sheep. The head fell plump; but for a second or two the body stood, spouting a vivid streak of scarlet from the neck, and then toppled over. The old green-clad Hoja turned at the noise made by the crowd, saw the blood-stained sword waving behind him, understood at a glance what had happened, and shuffled on as fast as his yellow pantoufles would carry him.



VIII

It is probable that there never was in the history of the world a city so crammed with every sample of the tribes of rascaldom as Constantinople at this epoch. I saw, from the carriage gateway at the Hotel de Byzance, three coffee-coloured scoundrels pause at the place of custom held by an itinerant moneychanger. The man sat with his little glazed box of Turkish and foreign coins before him on the pavement, his whole financial stock-in-trade amounting to perhaps twenty or thirty pounds. One of the passing rascals offered for his inspection a diminutive gold coin, and the grey-bearded, venerable-looking money-merchant, having examined it, opened his case and took out a handful of coins to give change for it. The glass lid was no sooner lifted, than each one of the trio dipped in a coffee-coloured paw and took out a handful of money. The man who had shown the small gold coin pouched it again and walked on. The poor old money-changer rose to his feet and made a motion as if he would follow; but one of the ruffians half drew the sword which hung at his side, and turned upon him with a sudden snarl. The old man sat down to his loss, and made no further attempt to recover his stolen belongings.

Wandering up and down the city I was witness to a score of acts of equal lawlessness, and in point of fact the whole place was a prey to a restless terror. Between the city and the Sweet Waters of Europe there was an encampment of perhaps the most remarkable and varied assortment of blackguards that ever got together in the history of civilised warfare. Until they were known, the curious citizens used to ride out to look at them and wander about the camp; but one or two days' experience cured the people of Constantinople of this habit A Greek lady and her daughter were hideously done to death by the encamped ruffians, and the coachman who strove to rescue them had his throat cut Two or three events of this kind set the Christian part of Constantinople in a panic, and no white man ventured abroad after nightfall without carrying arms.

With all this the streets had never been bare. Every night the Grande Rue de Pera swarmed with passengers; the restaurants and hotels were full; and you could hear the raucous voices of the vocal failures of a dozen countries shrieking and bellowing through the open windows of the cafes-chantants along the street The one place that we frequented was the Concert Flamm. It was kept by one Napoleon Flamm, who in those days was known to almost every Englishman in Constantinople. He had a little silver hell beside the concert-room, and the swindling roulette-table there was presided over by a fat oily Greek, who might from his aspect, had some friend taken the trouble to wash him, have been supposed to be a diplomat of high rank. The table, as I very well remember, had but twenty-four numbers and at either end a zero. Had the game been fair, and had all the players been skilled, the proprietor of this contrivance must have taken by mathematical law a penny out of every shilling which was laid against the bank. I make no pretence to an extraordinary credulity; but I still believe that the fat Greek had a dodge by means of which it was possible to arrest the action of the wheel at the most profitable moment.

There was a Dutchman in the silver hell one night—a gentleman who told us that he was known in South Africa as the King of Diamonds. We learned later on, from independent sources, that though he had kept the suit he had changed the card. From Kim-berley to Table Bay the fame of the Knave of Diamonds had travelled, and if only one-half we heard of the man was true he had earned his title. For something like an hour and a half this gentleman and myself stood side by side at the roulette-table, and noticed unfailingly that whenever black was most heavily backed red won, and whenever the major part of the money was on red black turned up. We formed our own conclusions, and in our sober hours at least declined to play at that particular table.

There was a tremendous fight in these rooms one evening, which was begun in a comic way enough by Captain Georg von A———, of the 4th Konig's Dragoons—a handsome, dashing young giant of a cavalry officer, who had done excellent service against the French at Gravelotte, and who was now bent on joining that ill-fated Polish Legion which was for a while the receptacle into which was swept half the scoundreldom and half the honest adventurous spirit of young Europe.

Poor dear old Campbell, dead these many years now (he fell under Wolseley leading the black contingent on Secocoeni's Height), the young German captain, and myself, had dined together, and Von A——— had dined not wisely, but too well. He had learned a word or two of Turkish, and, supposing that the inhabitants of the Grande Rue and the frequenters of the Concert Flamm were Turks, he rose and uttered a patriotic phrase, 'Chokularishah Padishah!' which means, as I am informed on credible authority, 'May the Sultan live for ever!' All the befezzed and bearded gentry, hook-nosed, sloe-eyed and greasy of complexion, who frequented the cafe of Monsieur Napoleon Flamm were Greeks and Armenians, and whether the Sultan lived for ever or died next day they did not care one jot They stared somewhat impolitely at the handsome fair-haired young German, but said nothing. He carried on his parable in Turkish: 'Muscov dormous,' and illustrated his meaning by drawing his thumb with Masonic vigour across his windpipe.

The words and the action together were meant to signify that the Russian was a hog and ought to have his throat cut Straightway up stood a little Greek with a 'Je suis Muscov, monsieur,' and the captain promptly knocked him down. He had not meant to do anything of the sort, but the mere windy buffet of his big hand toppled the little Levantine on to the floor. There was an immediate shindy. A coffee-cup was hurled by some indignant compatriot of the man assaulted and sent a splendid looking-glass, seven or eight feet high, to irremediable ruin< A coffee-cup in a Constantinople cafe is made of porcelain as thick as a lady's little finger, and weighs something like a quarter of a pound. In less time than it takes to tell it the nationalities were mixed and sorted again. Gaul, Briton, and Teuton—there were seven of us from the north-western end of Europe—got shoulder to shoulder, and every man of us had half a score to tackle. I never saw so funny a fight in all my life, and certainly never enjoyed myself at less personal risk. The room was clear in something under five minutes, and England, France, and Germany stood triumphant. The little Levantine crowd streamed down the winding stair, and Campbell added insult to injury and injury to insult by picking up the hindmost small man and dropping him on to the heads of those who had gone before him. We all laughed heroically; but when we got downstairs, after the outgoing crowd, the aspect of affairs was changed considerably.

I am talking of many years ago, and I am not quite certain of local names at any moment People who know Constantinople can correct me if I mistake the name of the place; but I think it is the Rue Yildije which stands nearly opposite the entrance to the old Cafe Flamm and leads, or led, to the low Greek quarter. Anyhow, there is a sloping street there which runs down by a flight of rough stone steps towards the Galata district, and from this a fierce crowd came swarming, armed with broom-handles, knives, pokers, tongs—any weapon snatched up in the vengeful tide of the moment. Poor Campbell took command of our party, formed us in line, and made us draw our revolvers. The entrance to the cafe was wide enough to allow us to issue shoulder to shoulder in a sort of bow. We ranged ourselves along the wall, flanked the crowd, and took up a position across the pavement. Amongst our enemies those behind cried 'Forward!' and those in front cried 'Back!' We paced backward until we reached the Byzance Hotel, some fifty or sixty yards away, and there, once within the gateway, we put up our weapons, entered the hotel, and called for drinks. In a better-regulated city we might have heard something more about it; but, as it was, nothing happened, and the Chief Constable of the Consulate—from whom, by the way, I had bought the Irish Constabulary revolver which enabled me to make my show against the crowd—joined us in the course of the evening and laughed heartily at the tale.



IX

I have told how I went out as 'special correspondent' to an American paper in the Russo-Turkish war. From the hour at which we said good-bye to each other on the platform of Charing Cross railway station, some seventeen years ago, until now, I have never seen the military gentleman from Chicago at whose instance I went out to watch the events of the Russo-Turkish war. When I got home again, a month after the fall of Plevna, I made inquiries about him, and learned that he had exceeded his instructions, and that if he had followed the directions laid upon him by his proprietors he himself would have gone out to the seat of war. What object he proposed to himself in shirking that duty, and in sending out a man whose salary he could not pay, I never definitely learned.

For quite a considerable time I used to call day by day at the Ottoman Bank to ask if remittances had arrived, and so long as my funds lasted I used to bombard that recalcitrant Yankee colonel with telegrams insisting on the fulfilment of his contract. He took no notice of my messages, and in a very little while things began to look desperate. It was a great thing to be on the spot, however, and after some three weeks of fruitless anger and bitter anxiety I found casual work to do under a gentleman who had constituted himself the agent of an old-fashioned London weekly. I wrote an article for this journal, entitled 'In a State of Siege,' got money down for it, and lived carefully on it for some ten days. At the end of that time, I was strolling rather disconsolately round the Concordia Gardens at night-time, when I came upon a group of men with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. They were seated round a little table, drinking vishnap and lemonade, and chattering gaily amongst themselves. One of them called me to join the party, and another, whom I knew to be acting as agent for the Scotsman, was reading a newspaper. We talked indifferently for a while; and the reader, laying down his journal on the table, set his hand upon it with a solid emphasis and said, 'If I could find the man who wrote that article, I should ask him to go to the front at once.'

I glanced at the open sheet, and, lo! the article was mine. I said so, and in ten minutes I had made a bargain. I was to go up country at the earliest possible moment; and received instructions as to how to proceed in application for the necessary teskerai, a form of passport or safeguard without which no stranger was allowed to enter the interior. The search after that abominable testerai delayed me for many days, and I danced attendance on Said Pasha (English Said as he was called) until I was weary and heartsick.

At last I determined to go without the passport, and did so; but the delay I experienced brought me into contact with as queer a body of adventurers as I ever encountered in my life. At the head of these gentlemen was a Mr. Montague Edie, or Edie Montague (for he wrote the name both ways)—a young fellow of apparently four or five and twenty, who gave himself out, I think, as a lieutenant in the English navy, and who professed to have authority from the Turkish Government to sail a war-ship under letters of marque and to harry Russian commerce in the Black Sea.

Constantinople at this time was full of hare-brained adventurers, and Mr. Montague Edie was not long in gathering about him a band of officers. The business of the expedition was supposed to be a profound secret; but it was talked about with a childish naivete in all manner of public places. The chieftain laid in uniforms of his own designing, and strolled about the Grande Rue de Pera, gaudy in a Turkish military fez, white ducks and gloves, and a blue coat beplastered with gold lace. One or two of his lieutenants followed his example; and the unfortunate tailor who had provided these sartorial splendours held the Hotel Misserie and the Hotel Byzance in siege for days in the vain hope of extracting payment for his labours.

A droller set for the management of a ship of war was never seen anywhere. The second lieutenant, I remember, was fresh from St. John's College, Oxford. He had left his native shores for the first time on this journey, and his whole experience of the sea had been acquired in the passage of the Channel and the voyage from Marseilles to Constantinople. Poor Schipka Campbell put him under examination one evening at a brasserie in the Grande Rue, and elicited the fact that he supposed port and starboard to mean the same thing, and larboard to be the antithesis of the two. I forget the first lieutenant; but a subordinate officer was a fat City clerk who had been a volunteer in some London corps, and who on the strength of his military experiences had come out with intent to seek a commission in the Polish Legion.

The peculiarity of that contingent was that, so far as I know, not a solitary Pole ever attempted to join its ranks. The City clerk was seduced from his original purpose by die splendour of Mr. Edie's uniform. He was himself rigged out at the expense of the same unfortunate tailor who had supplied his fellow-officers; but he only wore the uniform once, having been caught and mercilessly chaffed by a contingent of British officers who were waiting for the formation of the Turkish gendarmerie under Colonel Valentine Baker. Associated with this crowd of silly and inexperienced boys was an old grey-bearded American doctor, who believed in the whole cock-and-bull story as if it had been gospel, and had undertaken to act as surgeon aboard that visionary craft. He was a delightful old fellow, and, for all his simplicity, had a vein of humour in him. Odd as it may sound, he was a man of some distinction, and had served with conspicuous honour in the Civil War, He had money of his own, and Heaven only knows how many generous things he did amongst the crowd of stranded foreigners at that time in the city.

'I don't lay out to know much,' he said to me one day; 'but I have made one discovery. Civilisation and the paper collar air ttwrterminous. Turkey is a civilised country. I bought half a gross of paper collars at the Bon Marche this morning. So long as I can purchase a paper collar I know I am in a civilised country, and when I cayn't, I ain't.'

I met the doctor a day or two after the publication of this memorable discovery, He was talking with one of the officers of the expedition, and suddenly he threw the walking-stick he carried high into the air.

'That lets me out!' he said, in a very loud and decided tone; and, quitting his companion, he beckoned to me to follow him. The old gentleman's face and gesture were so urgent that I joined him at once. He told his story in a vernacular racier than I dare to copy; but it came to this. The Government had got wind of the precious scheme (to which it had, of course, never given a moment's sanction), and had come down with an intimation that the originator of it and his subordinates would do well immediately to leave the country.

The chieftain was not thus easily to be balked, however. He called a council of war, and proposed to his astonished satellites that they should steal a gun-boat and turn pirates against the Russians on their own account. This delectable scheme was instantly rejected by the gentlemen to whom it was submitted, and it was the news of it which let the doctor out. He took steamer that afternoon for Syra, and I have never since heard of him. The officers of the letter of marque surrendered their uniforms to the tailor whom they had blessed with their patronage, and the chieftain went for a day or two to the lock-up at the British Consulate.

Sir John Fawcett—Mr. Fawcett he was in those days—chose rather to laugh at the whole business than to treat it seriously, and the adventurous young gentleman was released on a promise to leave the country. I myself was offered a post of honour in this remarkable contingent. The secret at which all Constantinople had been laughing for a week was confided to me in whispers at the Concert Flamm. I think—but at this distance of time I am not quite sure—that the post offered to me was that of Captain of Marines. I don't mind confessing, in justice to my own unwisdom at that time of day, that if there had been a boat and a marine I might have thought twice before refusing the offer. As it was, of course it was simply a matter for laughter.

I hardly like to leave Constantinople without a memory of the Polish Legion. I took a journey by the Shooting Star Railway with a chance companion, to see him sworn in and receive his commission as an officer of that regiment The place of assignation was a loft over an untenanted stable, for the time being the head-quarters of the corps. I never heard of their having any others; and I remember with unusual distinctness an interview one of the officers had with Said Pasha, who told him, with a perfect absence of reserve, that the Legion 'would be sent to the front and would be dissipated.' As a matter of fact, it never got really into form. I believe that there was never at any moment a solitary private in its ranks. So long as it lasted it consisted entirely of officers of various grades. Many of these, seeing how hopeless the whole enterprise had grown to be, abandoned it openly; others quietly slipped away without warning; and a good many willingly allowed themselves to be drafted into other regiments, where some of them did good service.

The English journalists in Turkey were divided by faction. We were mainly Philo-Turkish or Philo-Russian, according to the political colours of the journals we represented; and I know now very well that I was, for my own part, so impressed by the Bulgarian atrocities scare that I hardly knew how to look for mercy or right feeling in a Turk. The plain truth was very hard to get at, but now, through the far perspective of the years that lie between, it is easier to see with a judicial eye. If there is to be found anywhere in the world a gentler, a more hospitable, a more sober, a more chaste, truthful, and loyal creature than the citizen Turk, I confess that I should like to meet him. If there is anywhere to be found a man more devoted to duty, braver, simpler, gentler than the common soldier of the Turkish army, I would walk a long way to find him.

While the war went on, half of the men who sent the news of it out to the civilised world found the Turk anathema maranatha, and the other half were persuaded that the Bulgarian was a beast altogether despicable and cowardly. Since the Bulgarians have had a chance to govern themselves they have amply disproved that unfavourable theory, and 'the unspeakable Turk,' of whom we heard so much in those days, was in the main as good a sort of fellow as might be found in Europe.

The atrocities which shocked the world were, without exception, the work of the auxiliaries—the Tchircasse, the Bashi-Bazouk, the Zeibeck, the Smyrniote and Tripolite. I claim to know something of the doings of these gentry, for Mr. Francis Francis (then representing the Times) and myself were for six weeks the only Englishmen in what was known as the 'Roumelian atrocity district.' Day after day we lived among the Christian dead, night after night we saw the incendiary fires. From the heights of the lower Balkans—as at Sopot—we could see the horizon red. The deserted villages stank with the unburied bodies of men and animals. About them in the night-time hordes of vagabond dogs howled lugubriously in the dark.

It was wonderful and terrible to see how the old savage Eastern spirit could revive itself in these modern days—'Kill, slay! leave not one stone standing upon another.' In Kalofer, where there had been a busy and thriving population a fortnight before our arrival, there was not a creature left, and scarcely a wall on the summit of which one might not have laid one's hand. The town still sent up a melancholy smoke to heaven as we entered it late in the evening, and the last torch of war shone from a thatched roof at the uttermost limit of the place against the lowering darkness of the sky. The arabajee who drove the lumbering little vehicle in which our few belongings were stored fell upon his knees in the middle of the stony desert street, and delivered to mean impassioned address of which I could not make out one syllable. My dragoman translated for my benefit 'Man with the two sweet eyes,' said the kneeling orator, in possible tribute to my spectacles, 'why did we enter upon this disastrous journey? Allah has forgotten us. Let us return.' We were in two minds about it already, for the place was weird to look at and the air was a slow poison; but the horses were tired, and we ourselves had had almost enough of the day s march.

Suddenly I sighted a domestic rooster, walking with a certain air of pensive reflection down the street. I rested my revolver on my left arm, took careful aim and fired. The bird towered madly, executed a wild waltz, and went round the corner. The noise of the shot disturbed some members of his harem, and a hen fluttered into the branches of a tree close by. Francis potted her, and she fell at our feet. Here, at least, was supper; but at the first corner we turned, in search of a place in which to camp for the night, we found the rest of the feathered brood feeding on the carcase of a pig which literally heaved in waves of vermin life. We were very hungry; but there was a good two to one chance that our bird had enjoyed that uninviting diet, and we threw her over the nearest wall into the cinders of a smoking cottage.

We were resigned to remain supperless, when, with a prodigious clatter on the stony street, and a wild calling of voices, came down three Turkish Cossacks, detached, to call us back, from a party of regular troops which we had passed that morning. The news they brought was, that the country was alive with every species of unconscionable blackguard known to the time and region; and at their urgent advice we mounted our tired beasts once more, and rode until a journey of some half-dozen miles brought us to the camp. There we fed royally, and slept in safety.



X

There is a theory to the effect that every man or woman in the world could write at least one readable and instructive novel out of his or her own actual experience. There is a very apparent disposition to put this idea to the test of practice, though, happily, not more than half the world's population has been so far animated by it. An equally sage idea is that anybody, and everybody, can take a part upon the stage. To write a novel or to turn actor—to astonish the world with a new Waverley, Esmond, or Copperfield, or to dazzle the mimic scene with a novel Hamlet, Falstaff, Richelieu, or Othello—would seem the simplest thing in the world to the apprehension of a good many excellent people.

Charles Dickens observed a great many years ago that to 'come out' in a great part is one of the easiest things in the world; while to avoid going in again is one of the most difficult. In my time I have both come out and gone in again; and though I am not disposed to tax my modesty for defences, or to offer prophecies for the future, it is not improbable that I may repeat the experience in its completeness. I suppose that the pursuit of the successful actor is the most fascinating in the world. Here and there one learns that it has been distasteful in an individual instance; but these cases are only the exceptions which prove themselves and nothing else.

A great many people have been good enough to tell the story of my first appearance on the stage; and they have told it in ways so diverse, and yet so circumstantially, that I have been sometimes tempted to doubt the genuineness of my own recollections. Here, however, for what it is worth, is my belief about the matter.

I was in New Zealand some three years ago, when a travelling manager whom I ran across in the course of my wanderings asked me if I happened to have such a thing as a new and original drama about me. I confessed that I had a scheme for a drama in my mind (the manager confessed himself to be singularly anxious to produce it), and I undertook to finish it and to see it through rehearsal. It will be observed that none of the usual difficulties which lie in the way of the ordinary pretender to dramatic fame obstructed my progress. There was no question of suitability—no thought of excellence or the reverse. The travelling manager had anything to gain and nothing to lose by the production of a piece from my hand. It meant no more than the trouble of rehearsing; and if the thing failed, it failed and there an end; and if it succeeded, the manager stipulated for half profits wherever the piece might be produced. He has not, so far, retired from business. In the innocence of my heart I promised that the piece should be ready for rehearsal in three weeks' time, and I set to work with the greatest vigour, burying myself for the first week at Gisborne, a weird and lonely seaside town where there has as yet been no whisper of a railway, and where the steamers which ply along the coast may or may not call for the traveller, according to the weather.

If I may say so of myself without immodesty, I am a rapid and assured workman.

All my best work has been done at a tremendous pace. I turned out 'Joseph's Coat' in thirty-six sittings, a chapter at a sitting. 'Val Strange,' a work of equal length or nearly, was written in as many consecutive days. 'Aunt Rachel,' the one work of mine which may outlive me by a score of years, was written at such a pace that a copying clerk would have some ado to transcribe it in the time. Its three last chapters were written between sunset and sunrise in the midst of as tragic interruptions as ever befell the writing of comedy anywhere.

With this lifelong habit of swift workmanship upon me, I thought that all I needed was to see my theme before me, and to go at it with my whole heart as I would have done at a new novel. In writing a novel you want a live place and live people; and these being provided, your book is as good as finished when you are half-way through with it. But I shall never forget in what a quagmire I landed myself when I began to write 'Chums' upon this principle. I have always, since I can remember, been a student of the acted drama. I acted for some years as dramatic critic in the provinces and in London. I knew as much about the exigencies of stage construction as the average man, and found that that meant a little less than nothing. The very method of work looked curiously bare and bald. My study for years has been to me a theatre in which I have acted many scores of different parts, often enough before a mirror to assure myself of nature. Yet I no sooner began to write consciously for the stage than this useful faculty abandoned me entirely. I no longer saw my living people; but in their stead the members of the travelling company obtruded themselves upon me.

My leading lady was before me in the place of Lucy Draycott. She was and is a most excellent and charming actress; but she was only playing at being Lucy Draycott, and she stood in between me and my own conception in a way which filled me with a cold embarrassment. Then, again, Square Jack Furlong, a rustic rascal, who, as I boldly hoped, was to make quite a new type of stage villain, was to be impersonated by a heavy man of quite the conventional sort—a man who (small blame to him) would have no idea of the accent my scoundrel was to speak in (a vital point to me) and not a conception of the inner workings of his mind. In this way all the real people who supposed they were to interpret my shadows into flesh and blood converted my flesh and blood into shadow. Understand that I am not apologizing for a bad play or a failure. It was not counted either one or the other, though I must do something different to touch the mark I am in quest of. I am only trying to show in what fashion I was embarrassed by new conditions. My travelling manager nearly broke his heart because I would not at first consent to allow my villain to shoot little Harold, and at last in desperation I took his advice and killed an idyll with a single grain of melodrama.

The piece was somehow written in the time prescribed, and was produced 'under the direct supervision of the author,' by which fact it gained perhaps as much as might have been expected. It was produced at Auckland, and achieved a success which it was not destined to repeat in its fulness. It was admirably, and in one respect originally, staged. The second act was laid in the New Zealand bush: and since at Auckland folks know what a New Zealand bush-scene is like, it was needful to be a little truer to nature than we found it easily possible to be when the play was produced for a single experimental night at the Globe, or when it ran its twelvemonth course in the English and Scotch provinces later on.

Sir George Grey was interested in the production; and in Auckland Sir George Grey does pretty much as he likes, as he has a right to do when one remembers what the city, and indeed the whole colony, owes to his patriotism, his statesmanship, and his personal generosity. Without his aid the stage-manager's proposal could not possibly have been carried out; but, armed with his authority, I presented myself to the curator of the park, and from him obtained leafage enough to dress the whole scene without the help of the scene-painter's art. We had a backcloth, to be sure, and an artificial waterfall (which flooded the cellars, by-the-by), but for everything else we were indebted to Sir George Grey and pure nature. The live bush, the wounds of the woodman's axe concealed by heaps of vari-coloured mosses, bloomed and rustled under the limelight as I suppose it never bloomed and rustled elsewhere in the history of the theatre, and the stage was ankle-deep in withered leaves; the scent of the forest actually getting beyond the footlights for once in a way.

I have never in my life seen any theatrical spectacle one-half as lovely; and this one scene had a great deal to do with the success of the piece. It was frantically applauded, and the scene-painter walked in front and bowed as if he had been responsible for its beauties. I overheard from a sun-tanned gentleman in the dress circle near whom I sat one useful trifle in the way of criticism. When Mr. Stuart Willoughby entered with his swag on his shoulder my neighbour whispered to his neighbour that that fellow had never learned to hump his bluey in Otago. 'I'll bet my head,' he added, 'that chap's an Australian.' And so he was. The future Stuart Willoughbys were instructed in this particular, and the most critical New Zealander could have found no fault with the style in which Mr. David James, junior, carried his belongings in the Otago bushland of the Globe Theatre, London.

'Chums' hit the New Zealand fancy, and the little play was kindly received in many places. I had begun to write another drama of a much more serious sort, and was working pretty busily as well at a revised edition of my first effort, when a serious accident befell us. My manager and I were travelling together to Dunedin (for we had formed a definite scheme of partnership, and had arranged to spend a year or two in the preparation of a repertoire of pieces which might be fit to face the lights of London by the time we got there), when a telegram found us at a railway station en route. It told us that an important member of the company had seceded. I know now the story of his secession; but I have some slight acquaintance with the law of libel, and the history is of no particular interest to anybody.

We were announced to open in Dunedin in 'Jim the Penman,' and our missing man was to have played the part of Baron Hardfeldt The town was billed, seats were booked; there was no going back from the engagement without disaster. Then I had a goodly number of friends in Dunedin who were coming to see my own play, and there was a financial loss to be encountered into the bargain. Personally I experienced a keen sense of disappointment; but the manager was in despair. There was no filling the place of the recalcitrant for love or money—there was very little capital behind the concern; and, in short, it looked as if we had found a finish for our enterprise. Then it was that I bethought me, 'Why the dickens shouldn't I play Baron Hardfeldt?'

I communicated my idea to my companion, who grasped at it as a drowning man grips a straw. We consulted together. We found it possible to begin to study at midnight, and we arranged for a rehearsal on the morrow. I had seen the piece once, and recalled its general tenor, and began to construct a Hardfeldt. One of my dearest friends is a Zliricher, and I felt certain of his accent. That was a point gained, for the rascally Baron might as well have come from Zurich as from anywhere else in the world. I recalled, with no twinge of inward apology, every tone of my old friend's voice, every trick of facial expression, and every little touch of Swiss gesture which helps his breezy and warm-hearted talk. I determined to dower Sir Charles Young's admirable scoundrel with all my dear old J—— G——'s tricks and manners; and I was the less remorseful in copying his cheerful and childlike bonhomie because our recalcitrant had been in the habit of giving the Baron away at his very entrance, and had stamped him from the first as a ruffian of the deepest dye, whereas I was disposed to think that a really successful adventurer would be likely to have an honest and engaging manner.

At midnight I began to study; and at three o'clock in the morning I went away to bed, carrying with me the words and business of the part and a pretty bad headache. We rehearsed at eleven; and I was 'letter-perfect,' as actors say, and was always to be found on the very nail of the stage on which I was wanted. I have always boasted a verbal memory like a steel rat-trap. It never lets anything go upon which it once seizes. So far excellent. 'But Linden saw another sight' at night-time. I knew platform fright as well as anybody. I have thrice been physically sick before addressing a strange audience, though I have been hardened by nearly a quarter of a century of practice. John Bright once said in my hearing that he never arose to speak in public without a feeling of insecurity at the knees and 'the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the waistcoat.' But this first appearance on the boards took me beyond anything I had hitherto experienced. I recalled the phrase about the 'scientific vacuum' which had fallen from the lips of England's greatest orator, and tried to console myself with the hope that I might not play so very vilely in spite of the fact that I had forgotten every line and word. I was bathed in a coward sweat whilst I stood near the central doors of the stage-chamber into which I was shortly to walk like a sheep to the slaughter. The cue came, and I entered mechanically crushing an opera-hat against my shirt-front. I know that if the audience could have seen the face below the grease-paint and the powder, they would have seen something very like the face of a corpse.

Luckily I am very short-sighted, and the space beyond the yellow glare of the footlights was no more than a black and empty gulf to me. The Penman, my miserable sin-steeped confederate, took me by the hand and introduced me cordially to Mrs. Ralston. Until he had ceased to speak I had no remotest idea of what I had to say; but the words came somehow, and I half fancied that my old friend J—— G—— had spoken them.

There was a scattered round of applause at the end of the simple words I had to speak; for some of my friends in front had recognised me, as they might easily do, since I wore my own hair and beard. I did not think of this, but wondered dimly that I should have begun to make an impression so very early in the evening. I could see my breath rising like steam against the darkness of the auditorium, for it was cold weather and there was a touch of frost thus early even in the theatre. I sat and talked in dumb-show with Lady Duns-combe, was fittingly snubbed by Lord Dre-lincourt, and at length found myself alone with my confederate. The scene before me I knew to be one of the strongest of its class in the whole range of modern drama. I knew, impotent as I was, that I could play it—I could feel the sense of power tingling through my own impuissance. But the first essential was to know the words, and never a word knew I. Luckily Jim the Penman was an old stager, had played the part some two or three hundred times, and so knew most of the Baron's lines.

Whilst we were having our dumb talk with Percival I had told him that my head was as empty as a blown egg-shell, and had fairly frightened him into taking care of me. He gave me my first words in a guarded whisper at the close of every speech of his own, and shepherded me with the utmost care through the whole scene. I shall never forget the well-meaning feeble villain, stricken down by remorse and impending terror, and the dominative Baron bullying him the while, with words supplied piecemeal by the sufferer.

'And vot haf you to do vith shame?' inquired the Baron, and there stuck. 'Wife you cherish,' whispered the denounced one; and, thus primed, the inexorable Baron resumed, and, having reached 'Wife you cherish,' stuck again. 'Children you adore,' whispered Jim the Penman, gazing upward at his tyrant with filmy eyes of suffering.

'And the children you adore,' echoed the Baron in a tone which spoke his unrelenting nature. At last came one intolerable, awful moment, when the hopeless Jim could prompt no longer. The prompter was at his post, but took no earthly notice of the scene. He had witnessed the rehearsal and was taking things easily. There was nothing else for it. I walked across to him and asked him for the line, received it, and spoke it with a biting scorn which nipped my confederate to the quick. I was congratulated on that unwilling walk across the stage afterwards by an old hand who was present at this first appearance of mine. He told me that the pause, the walk, the turn, and the indignant scorn with which the words were spoken had impressed him greatly, and had assured him that I was a born actor. But by that time I had found the courage of desperation, and all my fears had melted into thin air. The words of the subsequent acts came readily, and before the last curtain fell I was as much at home as I had ever found myself on the lecture platform.



XI

Amongst actors one finds some of the queerest people in the world. The men of the modern school are very much like other people; but the old stagers can still find some of their number who are as richly comical as Mr. Vincent Crummies himself. They are like the dyer's hand, subdued to what they work in. I was thrown a great deal into the society of one elderly young gentleman whose speciality had for years been that sort of high-flying rattling comedy of which Charles Mathews was the chief exponent in my youth. He had the most suasive, genial, and gentlemanly comedy manner conceivable, and was never for a minute away from the footlights. At breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner, he played to the public of the hotel coffee-room. In the street he played to his fellow-promenaders. He played, and played hard, in the simplest private conversation. He had no more sense of moral responsibility than a butterfly. He was as admirable a stage liar, or nearly, as Mr. Hawtrey is; and off the stage he was as free from the trammels of veracity as he was when on it He could promise, explain, evade, as dexterously in his own person as in the character of Lord Oldacre or Greythorne or Hummingtop. The world to him was literally a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Old age will teach him no sadness. He will play at being old. Death will have none of its common terrors for him. He will play at dying. When last I heard of him I was told that he was very, very poor; but I am sure he suffers little. He is playing at making a fortune or playing at having lost one: pluming himself on some visionary splendour, or commiserating some picturesquely broken nobleman in his own person.

I enjoyed the most astonishing adventure of my lifetime with this gentleman's aid, and by his express invention. He had secured the right to perform a play of mine through the Australasian colonies and through India. Of course there were certain pecuniary obligations attached to the matter, and, these being disregarded, I ventured into the theatre with a request for a settlement My comedian was not in a position to effect a settlement, or perhaps he did not care to do it. He found a way out of the difficulty which I do not think would have occurred to one man in a million. He got rid of his creditor by giving him into custody for trespass; and I, being marched off by the police, had to find bail until the case was heard next morning. The magistrate advised me that I had a legal remedy; but my gentleman disbanded his company and betook him to a neighbouring colony. I was incensed at the time, though the business is laughable enough now, and I took out a writ against him, but never succeeded in serving it When I had found my bail (a local editor was kind enough to pledge his word to save me from durance), I had to put in an appearance at the police station. There was a big policeman on duty there, and he went through the essential technicalities with so grave a face that the farce for a moment seemed quite real.

'What's your name?' asked the big policeman.

I told him, and spelled it for him.

'Your age?'

I answered that question also.

'What trade are you?'

'I am a man of letters.'

'What's that?'

'Man of letters. Write it down. Man—of—letters,'

'Are y' educated? Can ye read and write?'

I was flippant enough to say that I could read and write a little, and the big policeman entered me as being imperfectly educated. That record stands against me unto this day.

We played all through the principal towns, and then we took to bush-whacking, setting up one or two night stands in places rarely visited by a theatrical company; and I believe that the business done in these small places was almost always highly satisfactory from a monetary point of view. Some of the villages we visited—for they were nothing more—yielded fuller houses and realised better profits than we found always in the capitals. I remember that we played once in a schoolroom built of corrugated iron and without a vestige of scenery. We put on 'Chums;' and the settler's parlour, the forest scene, and the outer view of the Otago homestead were each and all represented with the help of a green baize cloth, which hung at the rear and on either side of the stage, three upturned petroleum tins, three chairs, a tub, and a little oblong deal table with red legs. We had a stage space of about four yards by three. I played Square Jack Furlong; and in the last act my revolver hung fire and exploded a second or two too late, when it was unfortunately and accidentally levelled at the back of the leading man's head. The waxen pellet which packed the powder hit him smartly on the philoprogenitive bump, and he swore audibly.

A revolver is always a nuisance on the stage and a terror to the actor who has to use it. You may buy the best weapon in the trade, you may have your cartridges made with the utmost care; but there will always be a chance of its missing fire. You may have a double in the wings, of course, but even that provides no surety. I have known my own revolver and the double refuse duty at the same instant, and have faced the moaned inquiry of the leading man, who ought to have been stretched out in apparent death throes, 'What the devil's going to happen now?' To make matters better, when I had thrown away the useless weapon with an improvised execration and was about to hurl myself upon the virtuous victim, the pistol in the wings obeyed the pressure of the prompter's finger, and the leading man dropped to a shot from nowhere, to the great mystification of the audience.

I am really disposed to believe that the illusion of the scene is very little helped by the most elaborate and realistic works of scene-painter, carpenter, and upholsterer. I have seen the house drowned in tears over that lugubrious and hollow 'East Lynne' when the stage has been enclosed in green baize and there has not been a stick of respectable furniture on the boards. 'East Lynne,' by the way, is one of my puzzles. Except that it has once or twice wearied me to the point of exasperation, it has never moved me in any way; and countless thousands have cried over it. In the New Zealand back blocks people used to weep like watering-carts over its tawdry pathos; and when that awful, awful child, whose business it was to die and who would not do his business, talked to his mother about his mamma, the handkerchiefs waved everywhere, and a chorus of sympathetic sniffings and throat clearings almost drowned the fustian rubbish of the dialogue. I played Lord Somebody in the piece one night. I forget the unreal wretch's name; but he will be remembered as taking money to Isabel. He appears in one scene only and has some twenty or thirty lines to speak; but he contrives to go further and oftener away from nature than any stage person whose acquaintance I have practically made. Nothing but the good old-fashioned 'moo-cow' style could possibly have suited him. I believe I can boast a tolerable imitation of that antiquated elocutionary method, and I certainly spared no effort.

'And you, Isabel, the daughter of an earl! how have you fallen!'

That is one of the gems of the old humbug's speech, and I mouthed it as it was made to be mouthed. The house took the burlesque with perfect seriousness and good faith—chiefly, I suppose, because it was impossible to make the vulgar rant too clap-trappy and stagy. But as I was leaving, and as the house was already in a roar of applause, I came to grief. There was a dreadful draught at the back of the stage, and one of the ladies had been so careful against it as to pin the green-baize linings of the stage together so as to leave no place for an exit; and I was compelled to grope about for a minute or two in search of a way of escape whilst the applause changed to boisterous laughter.

And the memory of that little incident helps me to a reflection on one detail of the actor's art which is more effective when fitly used, and more disastrous when neglected, than any other of the multitudinous things he has to know and to bear in mind. An exit is half the business of the most important scene ever written. You may play like an angel, you may hold the stage for half an hour and thrill your audience; but, after all, you may kill your supremest efforts by getting off clumsily. I write, of course, for the ignorant. The actor knows these things, and more than I can teach him into the bargain. But I had a singular instance of the fact in my own experience. It came early and gave me a lesson to be laid to heart. I never played before a more friendly audience. Good reports had gone ahead, and the house was willing, and I think was even eager, to be pleased. I had settled to that bright and happy confidence which is the actor's most blissful experience in comedy.

I think I never played so well in my life as in that first act of 'Jim the Penman;' but the stage was vast in comparison with any on which I had until then appeared, and my customary business brought me only within half a dozen paces of the door-way by which I should have vanished. A sudden sense of strangeness and constraint came down upon me like a cloud. The happy feeling of confidence vanished in a whiff of chill spiritual wind. The last line was spoken before that unhappy half-dozen of paces was achieved; and I left the stage in a dead silence, which was as eloquent of failure as it had been one brief minute earlier of success. I played half as well next night, but disappeared with aplomb, with an effect as encouraging as the most exigent artist could demand. So painful a thing is it to learn a new trade! 'So much to learn, so much to do!'

I am ready to propound a novel theory, and I am insolent enough to believe that I illustrate it in my own person. The time of full middle-age is that at which a man most readily adapts himself to a new art. It is at that time most assuredly necessary to accept certain physical limitations. I advise no hitherto unpractised person to seek excellence as a ground and lofty tumbler after five-and-forty. No sensible person who has attained that respectable altitude of years will try to make a debut as Romeo. But supposing that a lad of fifteen and a man of five-and-forty begin on the same day to study landscape-painting, which of the two do you think will get nearer Nature's secret in five years' time? Personally I shall back—coteris paribus—the man of middle age. Or if it come to acting, who is likely (physical limitations on both sides duly considered, of course) to offer you the better study of a bit of human nature—the matured observer or the unpractised un-regarding youth? I back the middle-aged man once more.

My friendly critics of the London press told me that a middle-aged man had taken to the stage as a duck takes to water. It was a bit of kindly nonsense. I had worked like a galley-slave for nine months, and the nine months of a man of the world is worth the nine years of a boy. And do I profess to be an actor now? Not a bit of it, my friendly critic—not a bit of it, in all honesty. But I mean to be. There is no art so difficult—granted; but there is none so enchanting, so inspiring. Night after night for a whole week, bar Saturday, when Nature took a late revenge, I left a sick-room at Newcastle-on-Tyne; and every ache and pain fell away, and the sick treble changed to a healthy baritone, and manly strength came to pluck the halting pace of the invalid to marching time, and a feebly intermittent pulse grew full and calm at the splendid all-compelling influence of the stage. Had it been a cold lecture, now, or a speech on politics—and no man loves that kind of exercise more than I—the armchair and the warm fireside had not reached to me and beamed on me in vain. But the stage? That was another matter altogether. It is a better stimulant than the society of old friends. It is a finer anodyne than tobacco. It is a quicker and more constant pick-me-up than champagne. Sternest duty and purest pleasure wear one smiling face. And to think that I was well into the forties before I guessed this splendid truth!

But Nature is compensatory in everything, and her balance works in this accessible fairyland as elsewhere. The stage is the natural home of petty contretemps. When a man has dared to play in a piece of his own writing in a city like London it would be absurd to affect modesty or a want of belief in his own power to please. If under such conditions a man had no such faith, he would be an ass beyond the reach of satire. What else but faith in himself should bring him there? 'Que diable faisait-il dans cette galere?' Yet the bold amateur intruding is conscious of a resemblance in himself to the demons mentioned in Holy Writ He believes (in himself), but he trembles.

The night of the tentative production of 'Ned's Chum' at the Globe Theatre was the brightest in my earthly calendar. Yet as I waited for my first cue an irresistible, horrible cold nausea got hold of me, and I had to fly back to my dressing-room and to endure on dry land all the agonies of mal de mer. The call-boy's warning cry slew one keen anguish with another, and the wretch who had been physically sick with fear a minute before was, under fire, as cool as a cucumber. But there came one moment more of heroic trial before the play was over. I keep religiously the notices of that first night, and I have laughed more than once at the gentle trouncing I got at the hands of Mr. William Archer in the columns of the World. My critic complained, tenderly enough, that at one point I took the stage with an obvious effort, as if determined to show that thus and thus should a man behave under sudden news of irreparable ruin. I cannot quite tell, said Mr. Archer in effect, why it was not admirable acting, and yet it was not If he could have told, he went on to say, he might himself have been an excellent actor, and not a critic. But he wanted something—something was missing.

The miserable fact was this. I had never worn a wig in the part until that night, and I had forgotten for a mere instant that I wore one then. It was a part of the stage business to dash my wideawake hat to the ground, and—the wig came with it. For two or three dreadful seconds I stood frozen, expectant of the howl of laughter which generally follows such an accident. But the fates were kind, and the thing passed unnoticed save by two or three. My natural hair was much of the length and colour of the wig, and no derisive roar sounded in my ears. But I shall never forget the horror of those few waiting seconds; and I should like to ask Mr. Archer how far in his judgment such an occurrence might excuse an actor's momentary absence from pure nature.

I was once hit in the eye by a fragment of half-sodden turf thrown up by the explosion of a shell, and had time to think myself a dead man before I realised what had happened. On one occasion, his Excellency Ibrahim Pasha threatened to hang me out of hand; and I believed he meant to do it. I have been in many awkward corners in my time; but my inward forces were never more thoroughly routed than by that episode of the lost wig on the stage of the Globe Theatre.



XII

I suppose the confession I am about to make will stamp me in the minds of a great many people as an irredeemable barbarian. I care little for that, however, and I am staunch in the opinions which I have held all my lifetime. Perhaps my voice may find an echo here and there.

I am a lover of the noble art of self-defence, and to my way of thinking few greater blunders have been made by those who legislate for our well-being than was fallen into by the moral people who abolished the Prize-Ring. It should be admitted at once that the Ring was full of abuses at the time at which an end was made of it; but it was not beyond mending, and a marked deterioration has been noticeable in the character of our people since the sport of the Ring ceased to be a source of popular amusement. British fair play was a proverb amongst the roughest. The rules of the game were recognised even in a street fight, and the man who broke them was likely to be roughly handled.

It matters little that the sense of honour was crude and rough. It was there, and all bullies and blackguards were compelled to abide by it So long as it was the fashion to fight with fists, the use of the knife, the bludgeon, and the brickbat was far rarer than it is now. The most ignorant crowd could be trusted to police a brace of combatants. There is no harm in a stand-up fight with the weapons of nature. Men will fight, and we English people had the least harmful way of fighting of all the peoples of the world. No man was ever good for much with his hands who was not chaste and temperate in life. Excellence in this pursuit was the growth of all the more masculine virtues.

I have the kindliest memories of some of the old heroes. The very first man who helped me on with a pair of boxing-gloves was the mighty 'Slasher'—the Tipton Slasher, William Perry, who in the days of my nonage kept the Champion of England public-house in my native parish of West Bromwich, in South Staffordshire. He it was who trained my youthful hands to guard my youthful head; and I have a foolish stupid pride and pleasure in the memory of that fact The Worcester and Birmingham Canal divides the parishes of Smethwick and West Bromwich, and the Slasher's house was the last on the right-hand side—a shabby, seedy place enough, smoke-encrusted on the outside and mean within, but a temple of splendour all the same to the young imagination. The Champion of England dwelt there—the unconquered, the undisputed chieftain of the fighting clan. He reigned there for years, none daring to make him afraid.

I have been soundly flogged time and time again for visiting him. I have been put on bread and water and held in solitary confinement for the same misdemeanour, but the man had a glamour for me and drew me with the attraction of a magnet. I can see him now, almost as plainly as if he stood before me. He was a Hercules of a man, with enormous shoulders, and his rough honest mid-England features had a sort of surly welcome in their look. But for an odd deformity he would have had the stature of a giant; but he was hideously knock-kneed, and his shamble when he walked was awkward to the limits of the grotesque. You have only to invert the letter V to have an image of the Slasher's legs from foot to knee. His feet were strangers to each other; but his knees were inseparable friends, and hugged each other in a perpetual intimacy. In fighting he used to await his man, propped up in this inverted V fashion, and somehow he gained so solid a footing in that strange and clumsy attitude that he never, in all his experience of the Ring, received a knock-down blow until he encountered Tom Sayers in that last melancholy fight which cost him the championship, and the snug little property in the Champion of England public-house, and his friends and his reputation, and all he had in the world.

I earned one of the soundest thrashings I ever got in my life by playing truant from school in order to follow the Slasher to a wretched little race meeting, held at a place called The Roughs, on the side of the Birmingham Road, in the parish of Hands-worth. My hero was there in glory, followed about by an innumerable tag-rag and bobtail, and I am afraid that on two occasions at least he was tempted to swagger and 'show off,' as children say. He shambled up to one of the 'try your strength' machines: the figure of a circus clown, with a buffer to punch at in the neighbourhood of his midriff, and a dial on his chest to indicate the weight of the blow administered. The Slasher tossed a penny to the proprietor of the machine and waved him on one side; but the man stood in front of the contrivance and besought him pathetically not to strike.

'Not you, Mr. Perry, 'he said humbly; 'oh, not you, Mr. Perry.'

The Slasher, with an 'Away, slight man' motion of the hand, said 'Gerrout!' and the fellow obeyed, seeing that there was nothing else for it. Hercules spat upon his hand, clenched his fist, and smote. Crash went the whole machine into ruin, the wooden upright splintered, and the iron supports doubled into uselessness. The destroyer rolled on rejoicing; but the crowd made a subscription, and the owner of the machine stowed away his damaged property well pleased.

Mr. Morris Roberts was a gentleman known to local fame in those days—I am writing of five-and-thirty years ago—and Mr. Morris Roberts had a boxing-booth on the ground. In front of the booth he had a little platform, and from it he addressed the congregation gathered together at the beating of a gong.

'Walk up, gentlemen; walk up, and see the noble art of self-defence practised by Englishmen, not like the cowardly Frenchman or Italian, as uses sticks, knives, pistils, and other firearms, but the wepons pervided by nature. I've got a nigger inside as won't say No to no man. Also George Gough, as has fought fifteen knuckle fights within the last two years, and won 'em all, one man down and the next come on. If there's any sportsman here as cares to 'ave a turn at him, there's half-a-crown and a glass of sperrits for the man as stands before George Gough five minutes, no matter wheer he comes from.'

The Slasher, in the full tide of his wicked humour, stood below, and when the oration was ended he threw his old silk hat upon the stage. Mr. Morris Roberts was bawling that twopence did it—a first-rate sample of the noble art was to be seen for twopence—when this unexpected action froze him in mid-torrent.

'Come, come, Mr. Perry,' he said, when he had recovered himself a little, 'you can't expect George to stand up again the Champion of all England. That doesn't stand to reason, that doesn't. Now, does it, Mr. Perry?'

The Slasher smiled. 'All right Hand down half a crown and that there glass o' sperrits.'

'You don't mean it, Mr. Perry,' said Mr. Morris Roberts.

'Don't I?' cried the Slasher.

A sudden inspiration illumined Mr. Morris's mind. 'All right Come up, Mr. Perry. Sixpence—sixpence—sixpence does it!'

It was no sooner known that the Champion was really resolved on business than the entrance to the booth was besieged. I was borne in breathless, all the wind being squeezed out of my small body by the pressure of the crowd, and bang went sixpence, the one coin which was to see me through the expenses of the day. It turned out that Mr. Gough had been impertinent to the Slasher, and the offended dignitary punched him, as I thought, a little unmercifully. At the close of the first round the man of the booth said—truthfully enough, no doubt—that he had had enough of it, and the entertainment came to a premature end.

That was the last I saw of the Slasher for years. He was the cynosure of all eyes then, and observed of all observers. But there is no wolf so strong but he may find another to make wolves' meat of him; and Tom Sayers, who had fought his first fight—so tradition tells—on the canal bank within a mile of the Slasher's public-house, sent in his challenge, and poor old Tipton's colours were lowered for once and for ever. He mortgaged the stock and goodwill of the house and backed himself for every penny he was worth, and he was beaten. He was grey and over-fat, and his fighting days were over. I forget now for how many years he had held the Championship Belt, but he ought to have been left to rest upon his laurels, surely.

He was dying when I saw him again, and his vast chest and shoulders were shrunken and bowed, so that one wondered where the very framework of the giant man had fallen to. He was despised and forgotten and left alone, and he sat on the side of his bed with an aspect altogether dejected and heartless. In his better days he had liked what he used to call 'a stripe of white satin,' which was the poetic for a glass of Old Tom gin. I carried a bottle of that liquor with me as a peace-offering, and a quarter of a pound of bird's-eye. He did not know me, and there was no speculation in his look; but after a drink he brightened. When I entered the room he sat in he was twirling an empty clay with a weary listless thumb and finger, and the tobacco was welcome.

'They mought ha' let me aloon,' he told me, when his wits grew clear, 'I'd held the belt for seventeen 'ear,' (I think he said seventeen, but 'Fistiana' is not at hand, and I can but make a guess at memory.) 'They mought ha' let me aloon. Turn's a good un. I've sin 'em all, an' I've niver sin a better. But he owed to ha' let me be. Theer was no credit to be got in hommerin' a man at my time o' life. All the same, mind ye, I thowt I should ha' trounced him. So I should if I could ha' got at him; but he fled hither an' he fled thither, and he was about me like a cooper a-walkin' round a cask. An' I was fule enough to lose temper, an' the crowd begun to laugh an' gibe at me, an' I took to raeacin' round after him, an' my wind went, an' wheer was I then? He knocked me down—fair an' square he did it. Th' on'y time it iver chanced to me. I put everythin' I had o' that fight, an' here I bin.'

It will be within the memory of such as care for these things that, after the last great battle which brought the fistic history of England to a glorious close, Tom Sayers and the Benicia Boy, his late opponent, enlisted with Messrs. Howes and Cushing, proprietors of a circus in those days, and travelled the country, sparring nightly in amity together. My father, who had naturally about as much sympathy with the Prize-Ring as with the atrocities of the King of Dahomey, was nevertheless fired with admiration for the hero of Farnborough, and must needs go to see him. He astonished everybody who knew him by showing his silver head and whiskers in the bar parlour of the hotel at which Mr. Sayers was quartered for the night I suppose that the worshippers at Tom's shrine were of another sort as a rule; but he was evidently and mightily impressed by the old gentleman's interest in his career. He told a story which, in its main lines, I remember as well as if I had heard it yesterday, though I rack my brains in vain for the names of the two people concerned in it.

'I suppose, sir,' said Tom, 'as you never heard how I come to fight'—let me call him Jones.

No, my father never had heard.

'Well, it was like this. Lord —— comes to me a week or two before the Derby, and "Tom," he says, "I've got a notion. You and me," he says, "is goin' down to the Derby together," he says. "I've got a pair of snow-white mokes," he says, "and I've bought a coster's shallow. I'm having it painted white and picked out in gold," he says, "and it's going to be upholstered in white satin. Now, you and me, Tom," says his lordship—"you and me's going to get up in white shoes, white kickseys, white westcuts, white hats, white coats, white ties, and white gloves," he says. "We'll go down a reg'lar pair of bloomin' lilies!" Well, we did, and it was agreed to be the best turn-out of the day. We was walkin' in the ring when up comes Jones, and, without with your leave or by your leave, he hits me on the nose. Well, I was that soft and out of condition the clarrit was all over me in no time. I was goin' for Jones like a shot; but his lordship he stops me and he says, "Tom," he says, "you shall fight him," he says, "for two hundred pound." I did, and you may believe as I paid him out for that.'

We were greatly impressed with this narrative, and I have always thought the regular pair of blooming lilies delicious. I told Tom that I had known the poor old Slasher, and he spoke of him with respectful sympathy.

'He was the right sort, the Tipton was, and I was sorry to take him down. Perhaps somebody 'll come one of these days and lower my colours. It's my turn to-day and somebody else's to-morrow.'

I vex the shades no more. Their form of valour is no longer known amongst us; but there are some who regret. I find pathetics among them, and quaint humours, in my memory.

The End

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