 of a page doing duty everywhere and swearing to live and die in the
service of everybody, he could scarcely contain his admiration, which testified
itself in great applause, and the closest possible attention to the business of
the scene. The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age,
people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as
nobody's previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would
ever come of it. An outlaw had been very successful in doing something
somewhere, and came home, in triumph, to the sound of shouts and fiddles, to
greet his wife - a lady of masculine mind, who talked a good deal about her
father's bones, which it seemed were unburied, though whether from a peculiar
taste on the part of the old gentleman himself, or the reprehensible neglect of
his relations, did not appear. The outlaw's wife was, somehow or other, mixed up
with a patriarch, living in a castle a long way off, and this patriarch was the
father of several of the characters, but he didn't exactly know which, and was
uncertain whether he had brought up the right ones in his castle, or the wrong
ones; he rather inclined to the latter opinion, and, being uneasy, relieved his
mind with a banquet, during which solemnity somebody in a cloak said »Beware!«
which somebody was known by nobody (except the audience) to be the outlaw
himself, who had come there, for reasons unexplained, but possibly with an eye
to the spoons. There was an agreeable little surprise in the way of certain love
passages between the desponding captive and Miss Snevellicci, and the comic
fighting-man and Miss Bravassa; besides which, Mr. Lenville had several very
tragic scenes in the dark, while on throat-cutting expeditions, which were all
baffled by the skill and bravery of the comic fighting-man (who overheard
whatever was said all through the piece) and the intrepidity of Miss
Snevellicci, who adopted tights, and therein repaired to the prison of her
captive lover, with a small basket of refreshments and a dark lantern. At last,
it came out that the patriarch was the man who had treated the bones of the
outlaw's father-in-law with so much disrespect, for which cause and reason the
outlaw's wife repaired to his castle to kill him, and so got into a dark room,
where, after a good deal of groping in the dark, everybody got hold of everybody
else, and took them for
