reat pains to assure everybody that he is going to hang himself.
Before, however, he has had time to make the first coil of a hempen
collar, _Jack_ looks off, and descries the stranger in the last agonies of
strangulation, amidst the most deafening applause from the audience, whose
disgust is indignantly expressed by silence when he exits to cut the man
down. Their delight is only revived by the apparition of _Gipsy George_,
pale and ghastly, _with the rope round his neck_, and the exclamation that
he is "done for." _Barabbas_, the hangman, who re-appears with the rest,
is upbraided by _Jack_ for coolly looking on and letting the man hang
himself, without raising an alarm. Mr. B. answers, that "it was no
business of his." Like Sir Robert Peel and the rest of the profession, it
was evidently his maxim not to interfere, unless "regularly called in."
The _Gipsy_, so far from dying, recovers sufficiently to make to _Jack_
some important disclosures; but of that mysterious kind peculiar to
melodrama, by which nobody is the wiser. They, however, bear reference to
_Jack's_ deceased father, a clasp-knife, a certain _Sir Gregory_ of "the
gash," and the four gentlemen so recently suspended at Execution-Dock.

The residence of Content and Barbara Allen is a scene, the minute
correctness of which it would be wicked to doubt, when the bills so
solemnly guarantee that it is copied from the "best authorities."
_Barbara_ opens the door, makes a curtsey, produces a purse, and after
saying she is going to pay her rent, is, by an ingenious contrivance of
the Sadler's Wells' Shakspere, confronted with her landlord, the _Sir
Gregory_ before-mentioned. All stage-landlords are villains, who prefer
seduction to rent, and he of the "gash" is no exception. The struggle,
rescue, and duel, which follow, are got through in no time. The last would
certainly have been fatal, had not the assailant's servant come on to
announce that "a gentleman wished to speak to him at his own residence."
The lover (who is of course the rescuer) deems this a sufficient excuse to
let off his antagonist without a scratch; _Barbara_ rewards him with an
embrace and a rose, just as another rival intrudes himself in the person
of _Mr. John Ketch_. The altercation which now ensues is but slight; for
_Jack_, instead of fighting, goes off to Fairlop-fair with another young
lady, who seems to come upon the stage for no other purpose than to oblige
him. At the fair we find _Jack'