The stage-piece is called ‘Saturday Night’, and it had an astonishing run, but is only remembered now for the song of ‘Saturday,’ sung by the poor coachman and labourers at the village ale-house before he starts to capture his wife from the clutches of her seducer and meets his fate.  Never was there a more popular song:  you heard it everywhere.  I recollect one verse: 

              ’O Saturday money is slippery metal,
               And Saturday ale it is tipsy stuff
               At home the old woman is boiling her kettle,
               She thinks we don’t know when we’ve tippled enough. 
               We drink, and of never a man are we jealous,
               And never a man against us will he speak
               For who can be hard on a set of poor fellows
               Who only see Saturday once a week!

You chorus the last two lines.

That was the very song the unfortunate coachman of Kirby Hall joined in singing before he went out to face his end for the woman he loved.  He believed in her virtue to the very last.

‘The ravished wife of my bosom,’ he calls her all through the latter half of the play.  It is a real tragedy.  The songs of that day have lost their effect now, I suppose.  They will ever remain pathetic to me; and to hear the poor coachman William Martin invoking the name of his dear stolen wife Elizabeth, jug in hand, so tearfully, while he joins the song of Saturday, was a most moving thing.  You saw nothing but handkerchiefs out all over the theatre.  What it is that has gone from our drama, I cannot tell:  I am never affected now as I was then; and people in a low station of life could affect me then, without being flung at me, for I dislike an entire dish of them, I own.  We were simpler in our habits and ways of thinking.  Elizabeth Martin, according to report, was a woman to make better men than Ralph Thorkill act evilly—­as to good looks, I mean.  She was not entirely guiltless, I am afraid; though in the last scene, Mrs. Kempson, who played the part (as, alas, she could do to the very life!), so threw herself into the pathos of it that there were few to hold out against her, and we felt that Elizabeth had been misled.  So much for morality in those days!

And now for the elopement.

CHAPTER II

Mistress gossip tells of the elopement of the countess of Cressett with the old buccaneer, and of Charles dump the postillion conducting them, and of A great county family

The twenty-first of June was the day appointed by Captain Kirby to carry off Countess Fanny, and the time midnight:  and ten minutes to the stroke of twelve, Countess Fanny, as if she scorned to conceal that she was in a conspiracy with her grey-haired lover, notwithstanding that she was watched and guarded, left the Marchioness of Arpington’s ball-room and was escorted downstairs by her brother Lord Levellier, sworn to baffle Kirby.  Present with him in the street and witness to the shutting of the carriage-door on Countess Fanny, were brother officers of his, General Abrane, Colonel Jack Potts, and Sir Upton Tomber.