'Yes,' I said to the little pink imp; 'as a study the room had its drawbacks, but we lived some grand hours there, didn't we? We laughed and sang there, and the songs we chose breathed ever of hope and victory, and so loudly we sang them we might have been modern Joshuas, thinking to capture a city with our breath.
'And then that wonderful view we used to see from its dingy window panes—that golden country that lay stretched before us, beyond the thousand chimney pots, above the drifting smoke, above the creeping fog—do you remember that?'
It was worth living in that cramped room, worth sleeping on that knobbly bed, to gain an occasional glimpse of that shining land, with its marble palaces, where one day we should enter, an honoured guest; its wide market-places, where the people thronged to listen to our words. I have climbed many stairs, peered through many windows in this London town since then, but never have I seen that view again. Yet, from somewhere in our midst, it must be visible for friends of mine, as we have sat alone, and the talk has sunk into low tones, broken by long silences, have told me that they, too, have looked upon those same glittering towers and streets. But the odd thing is that none of us has seen them since he was a very young man. So, maybe, it is only that the country is a long way off, and that our eyes have grown dimmer as we have grown older.
'And who was that old fellow that helped us so much?' I ask of my little pink friend; 'you remember him surely—a very ancient fellow, the oldest actor on the boards he always boasted himself—had played with Edmund Kean and Macready. I used to put you in my pocket of a night and meet him outside the stage door of the Princess's; and we would adjourn to a little tavern in old Oxford Market to talk you over, and he would tell me anecdotes and stories to put in you.'
'You mean Johnson,' says the pink imp; 'J. B. Johnson. He was with you in your first engagement at Astley's, under Murray Wood and Virginia Blackwood. He and you were the High Priests in "Mazeppa," if you remember, and had to carry Lisa Weber across the stage, you taking her head and he her heels. Do you recollect what he said to her, on the first night, as you were both staggering towards the couch?—"Well, I've played with Fanny Kemble, Cushman, Glyn, and all of them, but hang me, my dear, if you ain't the heaviest lead I've ever supported."'
'That's the old fellow,' I reply; 'I owe a good deal to him, and so do you. I used to read bits of you to him in a whisper as we stood in the bar; and he always had one formula of praise for you: "It's damned clever, young 'un; damned clever. I shouldn't have thought it of you."
'And that reminds me,' I continue—I hesitate a little here, for I fear what I am about to say may offend him—'what have you done to yourself since I wrote you? I was looking you over the other day, and really I could scarcely recognise you. You were full of brilliancy and originality when you were in manuscript. What have you done with it all?'
By some mysterious process he contrives to introduce an extra twist into the squint with which he is regarding me, but makes no reply, and I continue:
'Take, for example, that gem I lighted upon one drizzly