s against the show was that the animals were fed
after it was out, and you could not see the tigers tearing their prey
when the great lumps of beef were thrown them. There was somehow not so
much chance of hooking into a show as a circus, because the seats did
not go all round, and you could be seen under the cages as soon as you
got in under the canvas. I never heard of a boy that hooked into a show;
perhaps nobody ever tried.

But the great reason of all was that you could not have an animal show
of your own as you could a circus. You could not get the animals; and no
boy living could act a camel, or a Royal Bengal tiger, or an elephant so
as to look the least like one.

Of course you could have negro shows, and the boys often had them; but
they were not much fun, and you were always getting the black on your
shirt-sleeves.

THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN

A great new experience which now came to the boy was the theatre, which
he had sometimes heard his father speak of. There had once been a
theatre in the Boy's Town, when a strolling company came up from
Cincinnati, and opened for a season in an empty pork-house. But that was
a long time ago, and, though he had written a tragedy, all that the boy
knew of a theatre was from a picture in a Sunday-school book where a
stage scene was given to show what kind of desperate amusements a person
might come to in middle life if he began by breaking the Sabbath in his
youth. His brother had once been taken to a theatre in Pittsburg by one
of their river-going uncles, and he often told about it; but my boy
formed no conception of the beautiful reality from his accounts of a
burglar who jumped from a roof and was chased by a watchman with a
pistol up and down a street with houses painted on a curtain.

The company which came to the Boy's Town in his time was again from
Cincinnati, and it was under the management of the father and mother of
two actresses, afterward famous, who were then children, just starting
upon their career. These pretty little creatures took the leading parts
in _Bombastes Furioso_ the first night my boy ever saw a play, and he
instantly fell impartially in love with both of them, and tacitly
remained their abject slave for a great while after. When the smaller of
them came out with a large pair of stage boots in one hand and a drawn
sword in the other, and said:

"Whoever dares these boots displace
Shall meet Bombastes face to face,"

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