to me as the most lasting. It proved to be a shin of beef:
unnutritious except for soup (and I carried no tureen), useless as an
object of barter. With this and two half-crowns in my pocket I
slammed the front-door behind me and faced the future."

Mr. Fett paused impressively.

"And you call me an original, sir!" he went on in accents of
reproach; "me, who started in life with two half-crowns in my pocket,
the conventional outfit for a career of commercial success!"

"They have carried you all the way to Falmouth!"

"The one of them carried me so far as to Coventry, sir: where,
finding a fair in progress as I passed through the town, and falling
in with three bridesmaids who had missed their wedding-party in the
crowd, I spent the other in treating them to the hobby-horses at one
halfpenny a ride. Four halfpennies--there were four of us--make
twopence, and two's into thirty are fifteen rides; a bold investment
of capital, and undertaken (I will confess it) not only to solace the
fair ones but to ingratiate myself with the fellow who turned the
handle of the machine. To him I applied for a job. He had none to
offer, but introduced me to a company of strolling players who (as
fortune would have it) were on the point of presenting _Hamlet_ with
a _dramatis_ personae decimated by Coventry ale. They cast me for
'Polonius' and some other odds and ends. You may remember, sir, that
at one point the Prince of Denmark is instructed to 'enter reading.'
That stage direction I caught at, and by a happy 'improvisation'
spread it over the entire play. Not as 'Polonius' only, but as
`Bernardo' upon the midnight platform, as 'Osric,' as 'Fortinbras,'
as the 'Second Gravedigger,' as one of the odd Players--always I
entered reading. In my great scene with the Prince we entered
reading together. They killed me, still reading, behind the arras;
and at a late hour I supped with the company on Irish stew; for,
incensed by these novelties, the audience had raided a greengrocer's
shop between the third and fourth acts and thereafter rained their
criticism upon me in the form of cabbages and various esculent roots
which we collected each time the curtain fell.

"Every cloud, sir, has a silver lining. I continued long enough with
this company to learn that in our country an actor need never die of
scurvy. But I weary you with my adventures, of which indeed I am yet
in the first chapter."

"You shall rehearse them on another oc