Here the interest begins; three or four foot-stamps are heard behind; Jack starts—­“Ah, that noise,” &c.—­and on comes the author of the piece, “his first appearance here these five years.”  He approaches the foot-lights—­he turns up his eyes—­he thumps his breast—­and goes through this exercise three or four times, before the audience understand that they are to applaud.  They do so; and the play goes on as if nothing had happened; for this is an episode expressive of a “first appearance these five years.” Gipsy George or Mr. G. Almar, whichever you please, having assured Jack Ketch that he is starving and in utter destitution, proceeds to give five shillings for a piece of rope, and walks away, after taking great pains to assure everybody that he is going to hang himself.  Before, however, he has had time to make the first coil of a hempen collar, Jack looks off, and descries the stranger in the last agonies of strangulation, amidst the most deafening applause from the audience, whose disgust is indignantly expressed by silence when he exits to cut the man down.  Their delight is only revived by the apparition of Gipsy George, pale and ghastly, with the rope round his neck, and the exclamation that he is “done for.” Barabbas, the hangman, who re-appears with the rest, is upbraided by Jack for coolly looking on and letting the man hang himself, without raising an alarm.  Mr. B. answers, that “it was no business of his.”  Like Sir Robert Peel and the rest of the profession, it was evidently his maxim not to interfere, unless “regularly called in.”  The Gipsy, so far from dying, recovers sufficiently to make to Jack some important disclosures; but of that mysterious kind peculiar to melodrama, by which nobody is the wiser.  They, however, bear reference to Jack’s deceased father, a clasp-knife, a certain Sir Gregory of “the gash,” and the four gentlemen so recently suspended at Execution-Dock.

The residence of Content and Barbara Allen is a scene, the minute correctness of which it would be wicked to doubt, when the bills so solemnly guarantee that it is copied from the “best authorities.” Barbara opens the door, makes a curtsey, produces a purse, and after saying she is going to pay her rent, is, by an ingenious contrivance of the Sadler’s Wells’ Shakspere, confronted with her landlord, the Sir Gregory before-mentioned.  All stage-landlords are villains, who prefer seduction to rent, and he of the “gash” is no exception.  The struggle, rescue, and duel, which follow, are got through in no time.  The last would certainly have been fatal, had not the assailant’s servant come on to announce that “a gentleman wished to speak to him at his own residence.”  The lover (who is of course the rescuer) deems this a sufficient excuse to let off his antagonist without a scratch; Barbara rewards him with an embrace and a rose, just as another rival intrudes himself