, and he always
had his sorrowful misgivings as to whether they liked it as much as they
pretended. I think, too, that it should be a flavor, a spice, a sweet, a
delicate relish in the high banquet of literature, and never a chief
dish; and I should not know how to defend my boy for trying to make long
poems of his own at the very time when he found it so hard to read other
people's long poems.

He had no conception of authorship as a vocation in life, and he did
not know why he wanted to make poetry. After first flaunting his skill
in it before the boys, and getting one of them into trouble by writing a
love-letter for him to a girl at school, and making the girl cry at a
thing so strange and puzzling as a love-letter in rhyme, he preferred to
conceal his gift. It became

"His shame in crowds--his solitary pride,"

and he learned to know that it was considered _soft_ to write poetry, as
indeed it mostly is. He himself regarded with contempt a young man who
had printed a piece of poetry in his father's newspaper and put his own
name to it. He did not know what he would not have done sooner than
print poetry and put his name to it; and he was melted with confusion
when a girl who was going to have a party came to him at the
printing-office and asked him to make her the invitations in verse. The
printers laughed, and it seemed to the boy that he could never get over
it.

But such disgraces are soon lived down, even at ten years, and a great
new experience which now came to him possibly helped the boy to forget.
This 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 Pittsburgh 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.

[Illustration: "THE BEACON OF DEATH."]

The company