e tragedian,
throwing an involuntary glance over my shoulder, "you 'll not catch me
assisting at any more of your Shakespearean revivals. I would rather eat
a pair of Welsh rarebits or a segment of mince-pie at midnight than sit
through the finest tragedy that was ever writ."

As I said this I halted at the door of a house in Charles Place, and was
fumbling for my latch-key, when a most absurd idea came into my head. I
let the key slip back into my pocket, and strode down Charles Place into
Cambridge Street, and across the long bridge, and then swiftly forward.

I remember, vaguely, that I paused for a moment on the draw of the
bridge, to look at the semi-circular fringe of lights duplicating itself
in the smooth Charles in the rear of Beacon Street--as lovely a bit of
Venetian effect as you will get outside of Venice; I remember meeting,
farther on, near a stiff wooden church in Cambridgeport, a lumbering
covered wagon, evidently from Brighton and bound for Quincy Market; and
still farther on, somewhere in the vicinity of Harvard Square and the
college buildings, I recollect catching a glimpse of a policeman, who,
probably observing something suspicious in my demeanor, discreetly
walked off in an opposite direction. I recall these trifles
indistinctly, for during this preposterous excursion I was at no time
sharply conscious of my surroundings; the material world presented
itself to me as if through a piece of stained glass. It was only when
I had reached a neighborhood where the houses were few and the gardens
many, a neighborhood where the closely-knitted town began to fringe
out into country, that I came to the end of my dream. And what was the
dream? The slightest of tissues, madam; a gossamer, a web of shadows,
a thing woven out of starlight. Looking at it by day, I find that its
colors are pallid, and its threaded diamonds--they were merely the
perishable dews of that June night--have evaporated in the sunshine; but
such as it is you shall have it.

II.

The young prince Hamlet was not happy at Elsinore. It was not because
he missed the gay student-life of Wittenberg, and that the little
Danish court was intolerably dull. It was not because the didactic lord
chamberlain bored him with long speeches, or that the lord chamberlain's
daughter was become a shade wearisome. Hamlet had more serious cues for
unhappiness. He had been summoned suddenly from Wittenberg to attend his
father's funeral; close upon th