water and clean,
drapping the egg, or trying who was to be your sweetheart out of the
lucky-bag.

As I have often thought, and sometimes taken occasion to observe, it
would be well for us all to profit by experience--"burned bairns should
dread the fire," as the proverb goes. After the miserable catastrophe of
the playhouse, for instance--which I shall afterwards have occasion to
commemorate in due time, and in a subsequent chapter of my eventful
life--I would have been worse than mad, had I persisted, night after
night, to pay my shilling for a veesy of vagrants in buckram, and limmers
in silk, parading away at no allowance--as kings and queens, with their
tale--speaking havers that only fools have throats wide enough to
swallow, and giving themselves airs to which they have no more earthly
title than the man in the moon. I say nothing, besides, of their
throwing glamour in honest folks een; but I'll not deny that I have been
told by them who would not lie, and were living witnesses of the
transaction, that, as true as death, they had seen the tane of these
ne'er-do-weels spit the other, through and through, with a
weel-sharpened, old, Highland, forty-second Andrew Ferrary, in single
combat; whereupon, as might reasonably be expected, he would, in the
twinkling of a farthing rushlight, fall down as dead as a bag of sand;
yet, by their rictum-ticktum, rise-up-Jack, slight-of-hand, hocus-pocus
way, would be on his legs, brushing the stour from his breeches knees,
before the green curtain was half-way down. James Batter himself once
told me, that, when he was a laddie, he saw one of these clanjamphrey go
in behind the scenes with nankeen trowsers, a blue coat out at the
elbows, and fair hair hanging over his ears, and in less than no time
come out a real negro, as black as Robinson Crusoe's man Friday, with a
jacket on his back of Macgregor tartan, and as good a pair of buckskin
breeches as jockey ever mounted horse in at a Newmarket race. Where the
silk stockings were wrought, and the Jerusalem sandals made, that he had
on his feet, James Batter used doucely to observe he would leave every
reasonable man to guess at a venture.

A good story not being the worse of being twice told, I repeat it over
again, that I would have been worse than daft, after the precious warning
it was my fortune to get, to have sanctioned such places with my
presence, in spite of the remonstrances of my conscience--and of Maister
Wiggie--