d read it to Garrick
several times, and Garrick said it was good and should make a hit. But
Garrick didn't know much about tragedies--law was his bent--he had read
law for two years, off and on. They would go to London and seize fortune
by the scalp-lock. In London good lawyers were needed, and London was the
only place for a playwright.

They scraped together their pennies, borrowed a few more, got a single
letter of introduction between them to some person of unknown influence,
and started away, with the lacrimose blessings of the elderly bride, and
of Davy's mother.

They must have been a queer sight when the stage let them down at the
Strand--dusty, dirty, tired and scared by the babel of sounds and sights!
And no doubt Johnson's enormous size saved them from sundry insults and
divers taunts that otherwise might have come their way.

Those first few weeks in London were given to staring into shop-windows
and wandering, open-mouthed, up and down. No one wanted the tragedy--the
managers all sniffed at it. Little then did Davy dream, as they made their
way from the office of one theater-manager to that of another, that he
himself would some day own a theater and give the discarded play its first
setting. And little did he think that he would yet be the foremost actor
of his time, and his awkward mate the literary dictator of London. Oh!
this game of life is a great play! The blissful uncertainty of it all!
The ambitions, plans, strivings, heartaches, mad desires and vain reaching
out of empty arms! The tears, the bitter disappointments, the sleepless
nights, the echoes of prayers unheard, and the hollow hopelessness of love
turned to hate!

And then mayhap we do as Emerson did--go out into the woods, and all the
trees say, "Why so hot, my little man?"

Garrick, disappointed and undone at the thought of defeat in his chosen
profession, turned to commercial life and then to the theater. At his
first stage appearance he trembled with diffidence and all but fled in
fright. He persevered, for he could do nothing else. He arose step by
step, and honors, wealth and fame were his. Love came to him: he wedded
the woman of his choice. And after his death she survived for forty-three
years. She lived one hundred years, lacking two. Garrick was born in
Seventeen Hundred Sixteen; and his wife died in Eighteen Hundred
Twenty-two, which seems to bring the times of Johnson pretty close home to
us. Throughout her long life, she li