true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid in
especial to me is my almost sick wondering of whether I mightn't be rapt
away before it did open. The impression appears to have been mixed; the
drinking deep and the holding out, holding out in particular against
failure of food and of stage-fares, provision for transport to and fro,
being questions equally intense: the appeal of the lecture-room, in its
essence a heavy extra, so exhausted our resources that even the
sustaining doughnut of the refreshment-counter would mock our desire and
the long homeward crawl, the length of Broadway and further, seem to
defy repetition. Those desperate days, none the less, affect me now as
having flushed with the very complexion of romance; their aches and
inanitions were part of the adventure; the homeward straggle,
interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt
contemplations--that for instance of the painted portrait, large as
life, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the Broadway
Theatre, Lola Montes, Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal
beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at the throat.

It was thus quite in order that I should pore longest, there at my
fondest corner, over the Barnum announcements--my present inability to
be superficial about which has given in fact the measure of my
contemporary care. These announcements must have been in their way
marvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toe
with its analytic "synopsis of scenery and incidents"; the synoptical
view cast its net of fine meshes and the very word savoured of
incantation. It is odd at the same time that when I question memory as
to the living hours themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hall
of audience, smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the curtain
rose on our gasping but rewarded patience, two performances only stand
out for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess
and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles--I see that still as the blazonry
of one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the
face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and
clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of
her lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of the
minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperate
crisis that I forget. I forget Huon the serf, whom I yet recall
immen