89
            A drunken and dramatic Hatter.
red at.     To the hotel and Carlyle, meeting
Ripley and W. Waud there.   I carried the former
off to a King Street photographer, to get his portrait
(the one inserted at page 50) returning to din-
ner.    In my room till 6.     After supper talking
with Marchant, (whose grand anti-perspective
free trade transparency, in front of his theatre,
had been utterly demolished and scattered by �the
wind and the rain of the previous day) when we
were presently accosted by a Mr Harry Covert,
a wholesale hatter of Meeting Street, not far from
the appro Charleston Hotel, on the opposite side of
the way.         He was a rather small, red-haired
man with a heavy moustache and imperial, a
la Napoleon 3, a member of the Rutledge Moun-
ted Rifles.      Being rather inebriated, he must
needs insist on our going off to a King Street
restaurant to see him sup and drink champagne,
during which proceedings we were joined by an
old boy, the proprietor of Marchant�s theatre, who
presently left us.          In an hour we adjourned to
the theatre, to Marchant�s �bijou� as young ass
Wood affectedly denominated it, there to drink
Sauterne.        Covert grew dramatic in proportion
to his intoxication and would fain give us a spe-
cimen of his histrionic abilities, so, with Lavine,