ant youths, of limited means I imagine; but they
have the pleasure of speaking to the comic singer, and take tickets for
that interesting gentleman's benefit. But the comic singer comes
forward, and sings with appropriate action of the doings of a little
insect very partial to comfortable quarters. That song I have known
fifteen years. I have heard Sharp sing it, Ross sing it, Cowell sing it.
Night after night in some drinking room in some part of London or other
is a beery audience told--

"Creeping where no life doth be,
A rare old plant is the lively flea."

And after a pursuit very vividly pantomimed, the little stranger is
suffered to be caught, and to tell the catcher that it is his father's
ghost, doomed for a season to walk the earth and nip him most infernally,
and so on. Now I am sure that every one in the room has heard this
dozens of times before, yet old men are laughing as if it was an absolute
novelty. Talk about alcohol brightening men's intellects! When I come
to such places as this, it always seems to me to have a precisely
contrary effect. Men could not sit and hear all these stale witticisms
unless they drank. Sober, I am sure they could not do it, not even if
they were paid for it; and yet all seem enraptured. I remark, however,
one exception. Two waiters help to a seat by my side a very dirty little
man with red eyes, and generally shabby appearance. The waiters set down
by him a glass of grog, offer him a cigar, and then playfully shaking
their fingers at him, as if to intimate he had better be quiet, leave him
to his fate. After a few minutes of deep thought, he looks to me and
beckons. I take no notice. He repeats the signal. I lean forward.

"Very o-old, sir."

"What do you mean?" we ask.

"The comic singer very o-old, sir."

We intimate as much.

"But get him on a fresh piece, sir, and see how he can go-o." Here our
friend began rolling one arm rapidly round the other, to give us an idea
of the comic singer's powers.

"Pity he don't give something new," repeats our friend. Another
assenting nod on our part and the conversation ceases. But we suppose it
is with comic singers as with others. "A man who has settled his
opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his convictions
disturbed," wrote Dr Johnson, and a comic singer does not like to have
the bother of learning fresh songs. But the comic singer was applauded
and encored, and then he treated us