k me very rarely to the theatre; but my Quaker school-mates
had never seen the inside of such places at all, and therefore listened
greedily to what I could tell them of the sights. One of the wonders of
my youth was the seeing the great elephant Columbus perform in a play
called "The Englishman in Siam." It was indeed very curious, and it is
described as such in works on natural history. And I saw Edwin Forrest
(whom I learned to know in later years) in "Metamora," and Fanny Kemble
in "Beatrice," and so on. As for George Boker, he went, I believe, to
every place of amusement whenever he pleased, and talked familiarly of
actors, some of whom he actually knew, and their lives, in a manner which
awoke in me awe and a feeling as being humble and ignorant indeed. As we
grew older, Boker and I, from reading "Don Quixote" and Scott, used to
sit together for hours improvising legends of chivalry and marvellous
romances. It was in the year when it first appeared that I read (in the
_New Monthly_) and got quite by heart the rhyming tale of "Sir Rupert the
Fearless," a tale of the Rhine, one of the Ingoldsby legends, by Barham.
I can still repeat a great part of it. I bore it in mind till in after
years it inspired (allied to Goethe's _Wassermadchen_) my ballad of _De
Maiden mit Nodings on_, which has, as I now write, been very recently
parodied and pictured by _Punch_, March 18, 1893. My mother had taught
me to get poetry by heart, and by the time I was ten years of age, I had
imbibed, so to speak, an immense quantity; for, as in opium-eating, those
who begin by effort end by taking in with ease.

There was something else so very characteristic of old Philadelphia that
I will not pass it by. In the fall of the year the reed-bird, which is
quite as good as the ortolan of Italy, and very much like it (I prefer
the reed-bird), came in large flocks to the marshes and shores of the
Delaware and Schuylkill. Then might be seen a quaint and marvellous
sight of men and boys of all ages and conditions, with firearms of every
faculty and form, followed by dogs of every degree of badness, in all
kinds of boats, among which the _bateau_ of boards predominated,
intermingled with an occasional Maryland dug-out or poplar canoe. Many,
however, crept on foot along the shore, and this could be seen below the
Navy Yard even within the city limits. Then, as flock after flock of
once bobolinks and now reed-birds rose or fell in flurried fli