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, afterwards 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,"

if the boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama
preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty,
her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart,
but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who
fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down--click-click,
click-click--and died all over the deck of the pirate ship in the
opening piece. This was called the "Beacon of Death," and the scene
represented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lantern dangling
from the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to their doom.
Afterwards, the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap of the
dialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the pirate captain
appeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, "Let us go below and
get some brandy!" the boy would have bartered all his hopes of bliss to
have been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked, and longed
to be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play, and he so
glutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years at the
theatre that he afterwards came to be very tired of it, and avoided the
plays and novels that had very marked villains in them.

He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night, and he
lived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted, which was
well on to midnight; for in those days the theatre did not meanly put
the public off with one play, but gave it a heartful and its money's
worth with three. On his first night my boy saw "The Beacon of Death,"
"Bombastes Furioso," and "Black-eyed Susan," and he never afterwards saw
less than three plays each night, and he never missed a night, as long
as the theatre languished in the unfr