e and some other boys got into an empty mill, where they
found a painter on an upper floor painting a panorama of "Paradise
Lost." This masterpiece must have been several hundred feet long; the
boys disputed whether it would reach to the sawmill they could see from
the windows if it was stretched out; and my boy was surprised by the
effects which the painter got out of some strips of tinsel which he was
attaching to the scenery of the lake of fire and brimstone at different
points. The artist seemed satisfied himself with this simple means of
suggesting the gleam of infernal fires. He walked off to a distance to
get it in perspective, and the boys ventured so close to the paints
which he had standing about by the bucketful that it seemed as if he
must surely hollo at them. But he did not say anything or seem to
remember that they were there. They formed such a favorable opinion of
him and his art that they decided to have a panorama; but it never came
to anything. In the first place they could not get the paints, let
alone the muslin.

Besides the bridge, the school-houses, the court-house and jail, the
port-houses and the mills, there was only one other public edifice in
their town that concerned the boys, or that they could use in
accomplishing the objects of their life, and this was the hall that was
built while my boy could remember its rise, for public amusements. It
was in this hall that he first saw a play, and then saw so many plays,
for he went to the theatre every night; but for a long time it seemed to
be devoted to the purposes of mesmerism. A professor highly skilled in
that science, which has reappeared in these days under the name of
hypnotism, made a sojourn of some weeks in the town, and besides
teaching it to classes of learners who wished to practise it, gave
nightly displays of its wonders. He mesmerized numbers of the boys, and
made them do or think whatever he said. He would give a boy a cane, and
then tell him it was a snake, and the boy would throw it away like
lightning. He would get a lot of boys, and mount them on chairs, and
then tell them that they were at a horse-race, and the boys would gallop
astride of their chairs round and round till he stopped them. Sometimes
he would scare them almost to death, with a thunder-storm that he said
was coming on; at other times he would make them go in swimming, on the
dusty floor, and they would swim all over it in their best clothes, and
would think th