stuff
At home the old woman is boiling her kettle,
She thinks we don't know when we've tippled enough.
We drink, and of never a man are we jealous,
And never a man against us will he speak
For who can be hard on a set of poor fellows
Who only see Saturday once a week!

You chorus the last two lines.

That was the very song the unfortunate coachman of Kirby Hall joined in
singing before he went out to face his end for the woman he loved. He
believed in her virtue to the very last.

'The ravished wife of my bosom,' he calls her all through the latter half
of the play. It is a real tragedy. The songs of that day have lost their
effect now, I suppose. They will ever remain pathetic to me; and to hear
the poor coachman William Martin invoking the name of his dear stolen
wife Elizabeth, jug in hand, so tearfully, while he joins the song of
Saturday, was a most moving thing. You saw nothing but handkerchiefs out
all over the theatre. What it is that has gone from our drama, I cannot
tell: I am never affected now as I was then; and people in a low station
of life could affect me then, without being flung at me, for I dislike an
entire dish of them, I own. We were simpler in our habits and ways of
thinking. Elizabeth Martin, according to report, was a woman to make
better men than Ralph Thorkill act evilly--as to good looks, I mean. She
was not entirely guiltless, I am afraid; though in the last scene, Mrs.
Kempson, who played the part (as, alas, she could do to the very life!),
so threw herself into the pathos of it that there were few to hold out
against her, and we felt that Elizabeth had been misled. So much for
morality in those days!

And now for the elopement.

CHAPTER II

MISTRESS GOSSIP TELLS OF THE ELOPEMENT OF THE COUNTESS OF CRESSETT WITH
THE OLD BUCCANEER, AND OF CHARLES DUMP THE POSTILLION CONDUCTING THEM,
AND OF A GREAT COUNTY FAMILY

The twenty-first of June was the day appointed by Captain Kirby to carry
off Countess Fanny, and the time midnight: and ten minutes to the stroke
of twelve, Countess Fanny, as if she scorned to conceal that she was in a
conspiracy with her grey-haired lover, notwithstanding that she was
watched and guarded, left the Marchioness of Arpington's ball-room and
was escorted downstairs by her brother Lord Levellier, sworn to baffle
Kirby. Present with him in the street and witness to the shutting of the
carriage-door on Counte