her
frankness; her modesty and daring were as happy rhymes as ever touched
lips in a love-poem. But her impulses required curbing; her heart made
too many beats to the minute. It was an evil destiny that flung in the
path of so rich and passionate a nature a fire-brand like Romeo. Even if
no family feud had existed, the match would not have been a wise one. As
it was, the well-known result was inevitable. What could come of it but
clandestine meetings, secret marriage, flight, despair, poison, and
the Tomb of the Capulets? I had left the park behind, by this, and had
entered a thoroughfare where the street-lamps were closer together; but
the gloom of the trees seemed still to be overhanging me. The fact is,
the tragedy had laid a black finger on my imagination. I wished that the
play had ended a trifle more cheerfully. I wished--possibly because I
see enough tragedy all around me without going to the theatre for it,
or possibly it was because the lady who enacted the leading part was a
remarkably clean-cut little person, with a golden sweep of eyelashes--I
wished that Juliet could have had a more comfortable time of it. Instead
of a yawning sepulchre, with Romeo and Juliet dying in the middle
foreground, and that luckless young Paris stretched out on the left,
spitted like a spring-chicken with Montague's rapier, and Friar
Laurence, with a dark lantern, groping about under the melancholy
yews--in place of all this costly piled-up woe, I would have liked a
pretty, mediaeval chapel scene, with illuminated stained-glass windows,
and trim acolytes holding lighted candles, and the great green curtain
slowly descending to the first few bars of the Wedding March of
Mendelssohn.

Of course Shakespeare was true to the life in making them all die
miserably. Besides, it was so they died in the novel of Matteo Bandello,
from which the poet indirectly took his plot. Under the circumstances
no other climax was practicable; and yet it was sad business. There were
Mercutio, and Tybalt, and Paris, and Juliet, and Romeo, come to a bloody
end in the bloom of their youth and strength and beauty.

The ghosts of these five murdered persons seemed to be on my track as I
hurried down Revere Street to West Cedar. I fancied them hovering around
the corner opposite the small drug-store, where a meagre apothecary was
in the act of shutting up the fan-like jets of gas in his shop-window.

"No, Master Booth," I muttered in the imagined teeth of th