All at once, he made a spring towards me, and, seizing my arm, thrust me into a corner of the room, where he held me fast, exclaiming—­

“Wretch! villain! restore me my wife—­that talented woman your infernal arts have destroyed!  You did for her!”

“Mr. Keeley,” said I, struggling to release myself from his grasp—­“my dear sir, pray compose yourself.”

“Unhappy traitor!” he shouted, giving me an unmerciful tweak by the nose; “Look at her silver skin laced with her golden blood!—­see, see!  Oh, see!”

This was rather too much, even from a man whose wits were astray.  I began to lose patience, and was preparing to rid myself somewhat roughly of the madman’s grasp, when a new phenomenon occurred.

The patient on the sofa, whom I had judged well nigh moribund, and consequently incapable of any effort whatever, all at once sat up with a sudden jerk, and gave vent to a series of the most ear-piercing shrieks that ever assailed human tympanum.

"Oh! oh!  Mon Dieu! je suis etouffee! levez-vous donc, monsieur—­n’avez-vous pas honte!"

I started up—­O misery!—­I had fallen asleep, and my head, resting against a pillar, had slipped down, depositing itself upon the expansive bosom of a portly French dame in the next box, who seemed, by her vehement exclamations, to be quite shaken from the balance of her propriety by the unlooked-for burthen I had imposed upon her; whilst a petit monsieur poured forth a string of sacres and sapristies upon my devoted head with a volubility of utterance truly astonishing.

I gazed about me with troubled and lack-lustre eye.  Every lorgnette in the boxes was levelled at my miserable countenance; a sea of upturned and derisive faces grinned at me from the pit, and the gods in Olympus thundered from on high—­“Turn him out; he’s drunk!”

This was the unkindest cut of all—­thus publicly to be accused of intoxication, a vice of all others I have ever detested and eschewed.

I cast one indignant glance around me, and left the theatre, lamenting the depravity of our nature, which is, alas! always ready to put the worst construction upon actions in themselves most innocent; for if I had gone to sleep in my own arm-chair, pray who would have accused me of inebriety?

How I got home I know not.  As I hurried through the streets, a legion of voices, in every variety of intonation, yelled in my ears—­“Turn him out—­he’s drunk!” and when I woke in the middle of the night, tormented by a raging thirst (produced, I suppose, by the flurry of spirits I had undergone), I seemed to hear screams, groans, and hisses, above all which predominated loud and clear the malignant denunciation—­“Turn him out—­he’s drunk!”

Upon my subsequently mentioning the above adventure to Jack Withers, it will hardly be credited that this villain without shame at once roundly asserted that, when I left him on the afore-mentioned night, I was at least three sheets and three quarters in the wind; adding with praiseworthy candour, that he himself was so far gone as to be obliged, to the infinite scandal of his staid old housekeeper, to creep up stairs a quatre pieds, in order to gain his bedroom.