Elliston appeared to be going to sleep, as soon as he had heard the first verse of a most barbarously long song; but, accidentally observing me, he climbed up to my box from the pit, making a noise, which altogether discouraged the poor young lady by this rude inattention to her melody.
"Why do not you play harlequin?" said I.
"I am too old," he replied: and then asked me how the farce went off.
"Famously," I replied. "I see you know how to profit by my advice, and you made fewer faces. But you took a great liberty with the public, when you began scolding the audience, instead of minding what you were engaged in," I observed to him.
"What business had that man to stick himself up there?" Elliston asked.
"From sympathy! He was looking at a mountebank!"
During the whole of this time, the poor young lady was exerting herself by the light of her solitary lamp, à pure perte!
"It is really unmanly," I observed, "to be so unfeelingly inattentive to a beginner, and one of the fair sex."
"Oh!" whispered Elliston, "Livius wants to father all his old sweethearts on me, I believe. I do not allude to this lady," said he, laughing, "it would be a libel on herself, and on mankind, to doubt her respectability; but then she cannot sing, and what is worse, he is going to bring me up three or four more next week."