! Fire, guns! Sound, tocsins! Shout, people! Louder, shriller and
sweeter than all, sing thou, ravishing heroine! And see, on his cream-coloured
charger Massaniello prances in, and Fra Diavolo leaps down the balcony, carabine
in hand; and Sir Huon of Bordeaux sails up to the quay with the Sultan's
daughter of Babylon. All these delights and sights, and joys and glories, these
thrills of sympathy, movements of unknown longing, and visions of beauty, a
young sickly lad of eighteen enjoys in a little dark room, where there is a bed
disguised in the shape of a wardrobe, and a little old woman is playing under a
gas-lamp on the jingling keys of an old piano.
    For a long time Mr. Samuel Ridley, butler and confidential valet to the
Right Honourable John James Baron Todmorden, was in a state of the greatest
despair and gloom about his only son, the little John James - a sickly and
almost deformed child, »of whom there was no making nothink,« as Mr. Ridley
said. His figure precluded him from following his father's profession, and
waiting upon the British nobility, who naturally require large and handsome men
to skip up behind their rolling carriages, and hand their plates at dinner. When
John James was six years old his father remarked, with tears in his eyes, he
wasn't higher than a plate-basket. The boys jeered at him in the streets - some
whopped him, spite of his diminutive size. At school he made but little
progress. He was always sickly and dirty, and timid and crying, whimpering in
the kitchen away from his mother, who, though she loved him, took Mr. Ridley's
view of his character, and thought him little better than an idiot, until such
time as little Miss Cann took him in hand, when at length there was some hope of
him.
    »Half-witted, you great stupid big man,« says Miss Cann, who had a fine
spirit of her own. »That boy half-witted! He has got more wit in his little
finger than you have in all your great person! You are a very good man, Ridley,
very good-natured, I'm sure, and bear with the teasing of a waspish old woman;
but you are not the wisest of mankind. Tut, tut, don't tell me. You know you
spell out the words when you read the newspaper still, and what would your bills
look like if I did not write