"My head aches horribly," remarked Richard, Duke of Gloster—"I would give my kingdom for a drink!"
"And I," observed Shylock—"would like a pound of flesh, providing it were beefsteak, for I am almost famished."
"Hah! what a hog!" growled Cardinal Richelieu, one side of whose face had been "cove in" most dreadfully—"to think of eating at such a time as this!"
"Hark," said Claude Melnott, whose handsome countenance had been knocked completely out of shape, and who looked as if he had just returned from the wars rather the worse for wear; "hark! Don't you hear the sound of artillery, and of music? The ceremonies and festivities of the glorious day have commenced. Would to Heaven that I were with Pauline, in our palace on the lake of Como!"
"Dry up, you fool!" angrily exclaimed the aged and venerable King Lear, whose nasal organ exhibited signs of its having sustained a violent contusion—"I haven't closed an eye during the whole night, and now you keep me awake with your infernal jabbering. Shut up, I say!"
"Oh, shut up be blowed!" said P. Jones—"how can a man shut up when he thinks of the good budge (rum) he loses by being shut up here? Rube Meer, isn't this too bad?"
"Worse than the time when I sent on a fishing excursion with Jim Morse," groaned poor Rube, as he fumbled in his pocket for a match with which to light his pipe, "has anybody got a rope with which a fellow could contrive to hang himself?"
"I say, Jack Adams," said Sam Palmer, who was dressed as Don Caesar de Bezas, "what will Harry Smith and old Kimball say, when we don't make our appearance to-day, the busiest day in the whole year?"
"I care not," replied Jack, as he fondly pressed the portrait of his Katy to his lips, "so long as this blessed consolation is left me, the world may do its worst! Frown on, ye fiends of misfortune! I defy ye all, so long as my Katy Darling remains but true!"
"That's the one!" shouted the bold Dick Brown, as "usher" at the National Theatre, "let us have the song of Katy Darling, and all join in the chorus."