her sing him to sleep. Every time she attempted to start
playing, shouts were raised for Joss.

At length the chairman, overcoming his evident disinclination to take any
sort of hand whatever in the game, rose and gently hinted at the
desirability of silence. The suggestion not meeting with any support, he
proceeded to adopt sterner measures. He addressed himself personally to
the ringleader of the rioters, the man who had first championed the cause
of the absent Joss. This person was a brawny individual, who, judging
from appearances, followed in his business hours the calling of a
coalheaver. "Yes, sir," said the chairman, pointing a finger towards
him, where he sat in the front row of the gallery; "you, sir, in the
flannel shirt. I can see you. Will you allow this lady to give her
entertainment?"

"No," answered he of the coalheaving profession, in stentorian tones.

"Then, sir," said the little chairman, working himself up into a state
suggestive of Jove about to launch a thunderbolt--"then, sir, all I can
say is that you are no gentleman."

This was a little too much, or rather a good deal too little, for the
Signora Ballatino. She had hitherto been standing in a meek attitude of
pathetic appeal, wearing a fixed smile of ineffable sweetness but she
evidently felt that she could go a bit farther than that herself, even if
she was a lady. Calling the chairman "an old messer," and telling him
for Gawd's sake to shut up if that was all he could do for his living,
she came down to the front, and took the case into her own hands.

She did not waste time on the rest of the audience. She went direct for
that coalheaver, and thereupon ensued a slanging match the memory of
which sends a trill of admiration through me even to this day. It was a
battle worthy of the gods. He was a heaver of coals, quick and ready
beyond his kind. During many years sojourn East and South, in the course
of many wanderings from Billingsgate to Limehouse Hole, from Petticoat
Lane to Whitechapel Road; out of eel-pie shop and penny gaff; out of
tavern and street, and court and doss-house, he had gathered together
slang words and terms and phrases, and they came back to him now, and he
stood up against her manfully.

But as well might the lamb stand up against the eagle, when the shadow of
its wings falls across the green pastures, and the wind flies before its
dark oncoming. At the end of two minutes he lay gasping, dazed, and
s