iendly air of that mainly
Calvinistic community, where the theatre was regarded by most good
people as the eighth of the seven deadly sins. The whole day long he
dwelt in a dream of it that blotted out, or rather consumed with more
effulgent brightness, all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before,
and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like those
villains on the stage, to have a moustache--a black moustache--such as
they wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven, and
somehow to end bloodily, murderously, as became a villain.

I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of ten
years; but I do not defend it; I only portray it. Being the boy he was,
he was destined somehow to dwell half the time in a world of dreamery;
and I have tried to express how, when he had once got enough of
villainy, he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue. At any rate,
it was a phase of being that could not have been prevented without
literally destroying him, and I feel pretty sure that his father did
well to let him have his fill of the theatre at once. He could not have
known of the riot of emotions behind the child's shy silence, or how
continually he was employed in dealing death to all the good people in
the pieces he saw or imagined. This the boy could no more have suffered
to appear than his passion for those lovely little girls, for whose sake
he somehow perpetrated these wicked deeds. The theatre bills, large and
small, were printed in his father's office, and sometimes the amiable
manager and his wife strolled in with the copy. The boy always wildly
hoped and feared they would bring the little girls with them, but they
never did, and he contented himself with secretly adoring the father and
mother, doubly divine as their parents and as actors. They were on easy
terms with the roller-boy, the wretch who shot turtle-doves with no
regard for their symbolical character, and they joked with him, in a
light give-and-take that smote my boy with an anguish of envy. It would
have been richly enough for him to pass the least word with them; a
look, a smile from them would have been bliss; but he shrank out of
their way; and once when he met them in the street, and they seemed to
be going to speak to him, he ran so that they could not.

XVI.

OTHER BOYS.

I CANNOT quite understand why the theatre, which my boy was so full of,
and so fond of, did not inspire him to writ