for years, his only consolation during a long season of
poverty and neglect arising from the conviction that he was slowly but
surely improving himself in the difficult art he had chosen as his mode
of earning his daily bread. When the manager of the Royal Tabard, then
on a provincial tour, picked him out from all his brother actors, and
offered him a Metropolitan engagement, James Madgin thought himself on
the high road to fame and fortune. Time had served to show him the
fallacy of his expectations. He had been four years at the Royal Tabard,
during the whole of which time he had been in receipt of a tolerable
salary for his position--that of first low comedian; but fame and
fortune still seemed as far from his grasp as ever. With opportunity
given him, he had hoped one day to electrify the town. But that hope was
now buried very deep down in his heart, and if ever brought out, like an
"old property," to be looked at and turned about, its only greeting was
a quiet sneer, after which it was relegated to the limbo whence it had
been disinterred. James Madgin had given up the expectation of ever
shining in the theatrical system as a "great star;" he was trying to
content himself with the thought of living and dying a respectable
mediocrity--useful, ornamental even, in his proper sphere, but certainly
never destined to set the Thames on fire. The manager of the Tabard had
recently died, and at present James Madgin was in want of an engagement.

As father and son sat together at table, you might, knowing their
relationship to each other, have readily detected a certain likeness
between them; but it was a likeness of expression rather than of
features, and would scarcely have been noticed by any casual observer.

Madgin junior was a fresh complexioned, sprightly young fellow of six or
seven and twenty, with dark, frank-looking eyes, a prominent nose, and
thin mobile lips. He had dark-brown hair, closely cropped; and, as
became one of his profession, he was guiltless of either beard or
moustache. Like Mirpah, he inherited his eyes and nose from his mother,
but in no other feature could he be said to resemble his beautiful
sister.

Father and son were very merry over dinner, and did not spare the wine
afterwards. The old man could not sufficiently admire the shrewd
business-like aptitude shown by his son in their recent conference. The
latter's extraction of a written promise by his own father was an action
that the elder m