laughing.
He felt his importance, and took advantage of it. He would keep the
audience in a continual roar, and then come behind the scenes and fret
and fume and play the very devil. I excused a great deal in him,
however, knowing that comic actors are a little prone to this infirmity
of temper.

I had another trouble of a nearer and dearer nature to struggle with;
which was, the affection of my wife. As ill luck would have it, she
took it into her head to be very fond of me, and became intolerably
jealous. I could not keep a pretty girl in the company, and hardly
dared embrace an ugly one, even when my part required it. I have known
her to reduce a fine lady to tatters, "to very rags," as Hamlet says,
in an instant, and destroy one of the very best dresses in the
wardrobe; merely because she saw me kiss her at the side
scenes;--though I give you my honor it was done merely by way of
rehearsal.

This was doubly annoying, because I have a natural liking to pretty
faces, and wish to have them about me; and because they are
indispensable to the success of a company at a fair, where one has to
vie with so many rival theatres. But when once a jealous wife gets a
freak in her head there's no use in talking of interest or anything
else. Egad, sirs, I have more than once trembled when, during a fit of
her tantrums, she was playing high tragedy, and flourishing her tin
dagger on the stage, lest she should give way to her humor, and stab
some fancied rival in good earnest.

I went on better, however, than could be expected, considering the
weakness of my flesh and the violence of my rib. I had not a much worse
time of it than old Jupiter, whose spouse was continually ferreting out
some new intrigue and making the heavens almost too hot to hold him.

At length, as luck would have it, we were performing at a country fair,
when I understood the theatre of a neighboring town to be vacant. I had
always been desirous to be enrolled in a settled company, and the
height of my desire was to get on a par with a brother-in-law, who was
manager of a regular theatre, and who had looked down upon me. Here was
an opportunity not to be neglected. I concluded an agreement with the
proprietors, and in a few days opened the theatre with great eclat.

Behold me now at the summit of my ambition, "the high top-gallant of my
joy," as Thomas says. No longer a chieftain of a wandering tribe, but
the monarch of a legitimate throne--and entitled to c