“Our exhibition generally begins with a sailor doing a hornpipe, and then the tight-rope dancing, and after that the Scotch hornpipe dancing. The little figures regularly move their legs as if dancing, the same as on the stage, only it’s more cleverer, for they’re made to do it by ingenuity. Then comes the piece called ‘Cobbler Jobson.’ We call it ‘the laughable, comic, and interesting scene of old Father Jobson, the London cobbler; or, the old Lady disappointed of her Slipper.’ I am in front, doing the speaking and playing the music on the pandanean pipe. That’s the real word for the pipe, from the Romans, when they first invaded England. That’s the first music ever introduced into England, when the Romans first invaded it. I have to do the dialogue in four different voices. There is the child, the woman, the countryman, and myself, and there’s not many as can do it besides me and another.
“The piece called Cobbler Jobson is this. It opens with the shadow of a cottage on one side of the sheet, and a cobbler’s stall on the other. There are boots and shoes hanging up in the windows of the cobbler’s stall. Cobbler Jobson is supposed at work inside, and heard singing:
‘An old cobbler I am,
And live in my stall;
It serves me for house,
Parlour, kitchen, and all.
No coin in my pocket,
No care in my pate,
I sit down at my ease,
And get drunk when I please.