I remember it especially because it was the day following this I was
in at the death, when Ebenezer Smith, the Mayfair murderer, came to
his end. He made an excellent breakfast of ham and eggs just before
his execution, the Governor was good enough to tell me, and was
collected enough even to grumble at the age of one of the eggs.

D---- L----, the famous comedian, was very funny always about his
eggs. I remember he had an idea that if you whistled to the hen before
the egg was laid the result tasted better when you ate it. He wanted
me to write a comic song for him on these lines, but the idea never
came to anything. I was very busy at the time collecting royalties.
The thousandth performance of _The Merry Murderers_ had just taken
place, and at last I felt free to shake the dust of the City from my
feet and devote myself to literature.

It was just about this time that Jim Peters became the idol of England
through knocking out the Black Bully--a coloured bruiser with an
immense capacity for eating beef--in a couple of rounds. Peters was
one of the best of fellows when he wasn't drunk, and could wink one
eye in a manner I have never seen equalled by that later idol of the
British public, M---- L----.

Alas! poor Peters from fat purses fell to thin times. He petered out,
in fact, as far as the Mile End workhouse, where I discovered him one
sad day, and was ultimately able to get him married to the lady who
sold winkles on the pavement just outside. Her previous pitch had been
just outside the Hoxton Theatre, but she told me she found Mile End
more disposed to her wares. The marriage turned out a very happy one,
I am glad to say, and it pleased me to think that Jim, having had his