this evidence may be rebutted years afterward, and the
conviction quashed without further trial by the unsupported statement of
the comic man.

That if A forges B's name to a check, then the law of the land is that B
shall be sentenced to ten years' penal servitude.

That ten minutes' notice is all that is required to foreclose a
mortgage.

That all trials of criminal cases take place in the front parlor of the
victim's house, the villain acting as counsel, judge, and jury rolled
into one, and a couple of policemen being told off to follow his
instructions.

These are a few of the more salient features of stage "law" so far as
we have been able to grasp it up to the present; but as fresh acts and
clauses and modifications appear to be introduced for each new play,
we have abandoned all hope of ever being able to really comprehend the
subject.

To return to our hero, the state of the law, as above sketched,
naturally confuses him, and the villain, who is the only human being who
does seem to understand stage legal questions, is easily able to fleece
and ruin him. The simple-minded hero signs mortgages, bills of sale,
deeds of gift, and such like things, under the impression that he is
playing some sort of a round game; and then when he cannot pay the
interest they take his wife and children away from him and turn him
adrift into the world.

Being thrown upon his own resources, he naturally starves.

He can make long speeches, he can tell you all his troubles, he can
stand in the lime-light and strike attitudes, he can knock the villain
down, and he can defy the police, but these requirements are not much
in demand in the labor market, and as they are all he can do or cares
to do, he finds earning his living a much more difficult affair than he
fancied.

There is a deal too much hard work about it for him. He soon gives
up trying it at all, and prefers to eke out an uncertain existence by
sponging upon good-natured old Irish women and generous but weak-minded
young artisans who have left their native village to follow him and
enjoy the advantage of his company and conversation.

And so he drags out his life during the middle of the piece, raving at
fortune, raging at humanity, and whining about his miseries until the
last act.

Then he gets back those "estates" of his into his possession once again,
and can go back to the village and make more moral speeches and be
happy.

Moral speeches are undoubtedly h