wn among the buried memories of the past, and I will find
that book, and I will summon up my courage and ask the publishers of
this volume to kindly allow the cover of that book to be reproduced
here. It is only by looking at it as I looked at it that you will
thoroughly appreciate my feelings on the subject.

I have found the box, but my heart sinks within me as I try to open the
lid. All my lost youth lies there. The key is rusty and will hardly turn
in the lock.

[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson

signed: Very sincerely yours,

George R. Sims]

So--so--so, at last! Ghosts of the long ago, come forth from your
resting-places and haunt me once again.

Dear me! dear me! how musty everything smells; how old, and worn, and
time-stained everything is. A folded poster:

'GRECIAN THEATRE

'Mr. G. R. Sims will positively _not_ appear
this evening at the entertainment held in the
Hall.'

Yes, I remember. I had been announced, entirely without my consent or
knowledge, to appear at a hall attached to the Grecian Theatre with Mrs.
Georgina Weldon, and take part in an entertainment. This notice was
stuck about outside the theatre in consequence of my indignant
remonstrance. My old friend Mr. George Conquest had, I need hardly say,
nothing to do with that bill. Some one had taken the hall for a special
occasion. I think it was something remotely connected with lunatics.

[Illustration: GEORGE R. SIMS]

My first play! Poor little play--a burlesque written for my brothers and
sisters, and played by us in the Theatre Royal Day Nursery. There were
some really brilliant lines in it, I remember. They were taken bodily
from a burlesque of H. J. Byron's, which I purchased at Lacy & Son's
(now French's) in the Strand--'a new and original burlesque by Master G.
R. Sims.' My misguided parents actually had the playbill printed and
invited friends to witness the performance. They little knew what they
were doing by pandering to my boyish vanity in such a way. But for that
printed playbill, and that public performance in my nursery, I might
never have taken to the stage, and inflicted upon a long-suffering
public Adelphi melodrama and Gaiety burlesque, farcical comedy and comic
opera; I might have remained all my life an honest, hard-working City
man, relieving my feelings occasionally by joining in the autumn
discussions in the _Daily Telegraph_. I was still in the City when my
first book