Mr. Fett paused impressively.

“And you call me an original, sir!” he went on in accents of reproach; “me, who started in life with two half-crowns in my pocket, the conventional outfit for a career of commercial success!”

“They have carried you all the way to Falmouth!”

“The one of them carried me so far as to Coventry, sir:  where, finding a fair in progress as I passed through the town, and falling in with three bridesmaids who had missed their wedding-party in the crowd, I spent the other in treating them to the hobby-horses at one halfpenny a ride.  Four halfpennies—­there were four of us—­make twopence, and two’s into thirty are fifteen rides; a bold investment of capital, and undertaken (I will confess it) not only to solace the fair ones but to ingratiate myself with the fellow who turned the handle of the machine.  To him I applied for a job.  He had none to offer, but introduced me to a company of strolling players who (as fortune would have it) were on the point of presenting Hamlet with a dramatis personae decimated by Coventry ale.  They cast me for ‘Polonius’ and some other odds and ends.  You may remember, sir, that at one point the Prince of Denmark is instructed to ‘enter reading.’  That stage direction I caught at, and by a happy ‘improvisation’ spread it over the entire play.  Not as ‘Polonius’ only, but as `Bernardo’ upon the midnight platform, as ‘Osric,’ as ‘Fortinbras,’ as the ‘Second Gravedigger,’ as one of the odd Players—­always I entered reading.  In my great scene with the Prince we entered reading together.  They killed me, still reading, behind the arras; and at a late hour I supped with the company on Irish stew; for, incensed by these novelties, the audience had raided a greengrocer’s shop between the third and fourth acts and thereafter rained their criticism upon me in the form of cabbages and various esculent roots which we collected each time the curtain fell.

“Every cloud, sir, has a silver lining.  I continued long enough with this company to learn that in our country an actor need never die of scurvy.  But I weary you with my adventures, of which indeed I am yet in the first chapter.”

“You shall rehearse them on another occasion.  But will you at least tell us how you came to Falmouth?”

“Why, in the simplest manner in the world.  A fortnight since I happened to be sitting in the stocks, in the absurd but accursed town of Bovey Tracey in Devonshire.  My companion—­for the machine discommodated two—­was a fiddler, convicted (like myself) of vagrancy; a bottle-nosed man, who took the situation with such phlegm as only experience can breed, and munched a sausage under the commonalty’s gaze.  ‘Good Lord,’ said I to myself, eyeing him, ’and to think that he with my chances, or I with his taste for music, might be driving at this moment in a coach and pair!’