n and insanity, of maimed and
severed limbs, and all the eccentricities and fearful forms of disease.
These considerations pressed with such weight on my mind that for a time
my ancestral craft was in danger of being ignominiously rejected by me.
Indeed, I began to think seriously of adopting a very different vocation.
And here I will make a confession, if the gentle reader will take it
confidentially.

It is a familiar fact, that every college-boy has to pass through an
attack of the rhyming frenzy as regularly as the child has to submit to
measles and the whooping-cough. A less frequent, but not less trying
complaint, is that which manifests itself in a passion for the stage and
in an espousal of the delusion that one was born for a great actor. At any
rate, this last was the type which my juvenile _malaise-du-coeur_ finally
assumed.

I have heard of a young gentleman who, whenever he was hard up for money,
went to his nearest relatives and threatened them with the publication of
a volume of his original poems. This threat never failed to open the
paternal purse. I do not know what effect the intimation of my histrionic
aspirations would have had; but one fine day I found myself on my way to
Rochester, in the State of New York.

My _role_ of dramatic characters was a very modest one for a beginner. It
embraced only Richelieu, Bertram, Brutus, Lear, Richard, Shylock, Sir
Giles Overreach, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. My principal literary
recreation for several years had been in studying these parts; and as I
knew them by heart, I did not doubt that a few rehearsals would put me in
possession of the requisite stage-business. And yet my familiarity with
the theatre was very limited. I had never been behind the scenes. Once,
with a classmate, I had penetrated in the daytime to the stage of the old
Federal-Street Theatre, and looked with awe on the boards formerly trodden
by the elder Kean; but a growl from that august functionary, the prompter,
sent us back in quick retreat, and I had never ventured again into those
sacred precincts.

Arrived at Rochester,--which place I had selected for my _debut_ because
of its remoteness from home,--I looked in, the evening of my arrival, to
see the performances at the theatre. It was a hall of humble dimensions,
seating an audience of five or six hundred. The piece was a travesty of
"Hamlet," neither edifying nor amusing. A little of the _couleur-de-rose_
which had flushed my pro