 CHAPTER II It may as well be owned that I had no natural aptness for the banjo and was always an indifferent player, but for dancing I had I am confident such a remarkable gift as few have ever had. Up to this day I do not think I ever have seen a step done by man or woman that I could not do as soon as I saw it. Not saying, of course, how gracefully. I am not, however, so vain or proud of this gift as I used to be, and should hardly have written the foregoing sentence at all, had it not seemed necessary to a proper understanding of subsequent passages in this narrative. I was still so small of stature, and yet capable of producing so much noise with the coppers on my heels, that, by the wholesale clerks and young bloods about town, I was considered in the light of a prodigy, and made to shuffle my feet at almost all hours and in almost all localities. It was by this means, at some place of convivial resort, that I attracted the notice and admiration of a conductor on the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad. He determined to have so much talent with him all the time, and prevailed upon me to be his train-boy. Here, as on the lake, I had the exclusive privilege of selling books and papers to the passengers. The great railways were not then farmed by a single person or firm as now. I was my own agent, and the regulator of my own prices and profits. Both of these, latter, I found it convenient to make large, and was again the possessor of more money than I cared to spend. It was my business to carry water through the cars at stated intervals. On a day train I could afford to perform my duty with promptness, when I had sufficiently worried the passengers with my merchandise. But on a night train, which came to my lot just as often as a day train, I took a more lucrative and, I fear, less reputable means of quenching the thirst of travellers. There were no sleeping-cars in those times, and I believe no water-tanks in the passenger cars. My memory may fail me in this matter of the water-tanks, but I am certain that I never filled them, if there were any, on our road. I don't know whether more people travelled then than now, but I remember the trains were exceeding long ones in those hot summer nights, and the people became terribly thirsty, and this is the way I comforted them. Taking a barrel of water, a pail full of brown sugar, and a proper amount of well-known acid, I concocted lemonade, which I sold through the train for five cents a glass. When thirsty lips asked piteously for water, I would tell the sufferer with perfect truth that there was not a drop of pure water left on the train. I blushed to write that I sometimes sold fifteen dollars worth of this vile compound in a night. I was taught how to prepare it by a man who travelled with a circus, and who assured me that all his ice-cold lemonade was concocted in the same way, and that, far from having killed anybody, it gave perfect satisfaction to the gentlemen and ladies from the country who were his principal customers. The only excuse I have to offer for myself now is that I was not conscious then how great a villain I really was. Toward the middle of the summer the cholera became so prevalent in the western cities that I thought it prudent to retire from the active life of a train-boy and live quietly on my earnings. I settled myself, therefore, at a fashionable boarding-house in Toledo. Here the landlady, fearful of the dust and anxious for the integrity of her carpet, made a remarkable compromise with me to the glory of aesthetics. Whenever there was a pressing request from the boarders for me to exercise my feet, she would bustle in with a large roll of oil-cloth, and spread it uncomplainingly on the parlor floor near the piano to the music of which I danced. This was, I think, the first introduction of clogs as a drawing-room entertainment. I soon came to be invited out as a sort of cub lion, and thus it happened that the rumour and dust of my accomplishments spread gradually throughout the city. One evening I strolled into what was then the St. Nicholas, and stepping to the bar, which came just up to my juvenile shoulders. I demanded authoritatively of the bartender if he had any good pale brandy. He said that he had. I told him in the same imperative tone to give me a ten-cent drink, and none of this instant death kind, either. This made somewhat of a sensation among the frequenters of that fashionable resort. They evidently mistook this brandy bibbing as a swaggering habit of mine, or as I was honestly prescribing for myself what had been recommended to me as the best preventive of cholera. Having swallowed and paid for the brandy, I was preparing to withdraw when I heard this dialogue going on behind me. Who for pity's sake is that? That? Why, that's just the boy you want. What can't he dance, though? Turning I saw a couple of well-dressed men seated together at the end of the room. I had barely time to observe that one was a stranger to me when the other called me to him, and introduced me to Johnny Booker. Now I had heard the songs, then popular, meet Johnny Booker in the bowling-green, and Johnny Booker helped his nigger, and when I was aware that I was standing before the person to whose glory these lyrics had been written, I was very much abashed. I looked upon a great Negro minstrel as unquestionably the greatest man on earth, and it was some time before I could answer his questions intelligibly. In the course of a few minutes, however, I was conducted into a private room where I was made to dance juba to the time which the comedian himself gave me by means of his two hands and one foot, and which is technically called patting. My performance it seems was satisfactory, for I was engaged on the spot. Mr. Booker was then waiting for the rest of his company to join him, and when they arrived I was instituted jig-dancer to the troupe, with a weekly salary of five dollars and all my travelling expenses. The other performers came I know not from what dismembered bands to the relief or grief of I know not what distant hotels or boarding-houses, but, I will venture to say, no landlord, to whom the more reckless of them may have been in arrears, could have regarded their movements with a more lively interest than I did after their arrival at Toledo, as they came straggling in, one after the other, with their bass vials and guitars and banjos in mysterious bags of green bays or glazed oil cloth, I looked upon them as I might have looked upon people who had come from another world. If some of them appeared a little seedy, in the long interval between this and their previous engagement, and if others wore their coats strangely buttoned over their shirt-wisms, I put it down, of course, to the peculiarity and privilege of genius. When I walked through the streets to and from rehearsal with these strange beings, it was a triumphal procession to me. I seemed crowned for the time with a glory with which my young imagination had invested everything belonging to them. It is impossible to convey an idea of the gratified ambition with which I prepared for my first appearance on the stage. The great Napoleon in the coronation robes, which can be seen any day in the Tuileries, was not prouder or happier than I when I made my initial bow before the footlights in my small canton, flannel, knee-pants, cheap lace, gold tinsel, corked face, and woolly wig. I do not remember any embarrassment, for I was only doing it in public what I had already done for the majority of the audience in private. If I had acquitted myself much worse than I really did, my debut would still, I am convinced, have been considered a success. So great indeed was the local pride of the good Toledans in their infant phenomenon that after the company had exhibited a week, my name, or rather the known bagarre which I had assumed, was put up for a benefit. On that day I had the satisfaction of seeing hung across the street on a large canvas, a water-colour representation of myself, with one arm and one leg elevated in the act of performing juba over the heads and carts and carriages of the passers-by. At night the house was crowded, and I was called out three times. But what afterwards struck me as unaccountably odd was that I received not one cent from the proceeds of this benefit. When my salary was paid me at the end of the next week, I was assured that this benefit business was a mere trick of the trade, and I was forced to content myself with the fact that I had learned something in my new profession. End of CHAPTER II We now started on our travels, staying from one night to a week in a city according to its size, stopping always at the best hotels and leading the merriest of lives generally. I had the additional glory of being stared at as the youthful prodigy by day, and of having more than my share of applause, accompanied sometimes with quarter-dollars bestowed on me at night. There are probably many who will yet remember to have seen their cities thoroughly posted and plastered with the glaring announcement in gigantic red letters that the metropolitan serenaders were coming. That was our company, and in that golden age of minstrelsy our coming was an event of some importance. It certainly seemed so to the management, for on our arrival it was further more announced in large sky-blue letters on all the prominent vacant buildings, and on all the low tariff or free-trading board fences that the metropolitan serenaders had come. Nor was this all. As soon as our property-boxes were unpacked, our portraits in most gorgeous coloured daguerreotypes were suspended about the entrance to the hall where we were to perform, and about the reading-rooms of the principal hotels. Bad as these unquestionably were, they were the very perfection of that style of art in those days, and thus it happened that those even who came upon our pictures to scoff remained to admire. In addition there was a collective and general, I may say very general, representation of ourselves on canvas, suspended across the principal street, we being attired for that pictorial occasion only, in green dress-coat and in pantaloons of the same shade as our lips, which were of a very brilliant and unnatural pink. I was sometimes astonished at the stupidity of the common public, who would frequently, as I stood among them, in graceful incognito, point out on this superb water-colour, the picture of the guitar-player, and decide in my hearing that he must be meant for the juvenile phenomenon. Now this guitar-player was in reality the longest, lankest, and by all odds the homeliest man in the company, and how the public should ever mistake him for me, the only original juvenile phenomenon, was more than I could understand. Looking back dimly through my memory at this picture, and aided as I am in my criticism by a recent interview with the venerable artist himself, I am led to conclude now that he had idealized and etherealized the form of that tallest and ugliest of guitar-players, as represented on the canvas, touching his light guitar, with his eyes turned upward in a soffic ecstasy, there was something so gigantically heroic in the spirit of his action, or in the blunder of the painter, but his body seemed in comparison to way but a scant nighty pounds, and all that was earthly in his appearance was, it must be owned, strikingly diminutive and phenomenal. Notwithstanding the annoyance caused me by the mistake of the common public in the matter of identity, I do not wish to be unjust to our artist. He is still living, at Cincinnati, a grey-haired man, supporting a large family by the honourable exercise of his brush. Although of late years he has confined himself mostly, he assures me, to the more materialistic and lucrative branch of his profession, house and sign-painting, namely. With regard to the picture in question, he said, the last time I saw him, that in it he had made an attempt, if he remembered correctly, to throw an ideal halo of high art about some of the portraits, that the tall guitar-player was a special instance wherein this treatment seemed necessary, and that in all his artistic experience he had never since come across a man that would stand so much for shortening. The latter part of the old painter's speech about the guitar-player was in a different tone of voice altogether, and in words which, from their queer pathos, I think I am reporting verbatim. Poor, blank, he said, calling my old comrade by name. He has long since gone to his account. I suppose we must all go sooner or later." Then after a meditative pause, the old fellow continued. No man is homely, I guess, in heaven, or too long and bony for good proportion. They say, too, that there's progression up there. He died more than ten years ago. Maybe he's now improving his talent by playing on a golden harp. He wasn't much of a guitar-player down here, but no matter. There was in our troupe a remarkable character by the name of Frank Lynch, who played the tambourine and banjo. He and the celebrated diamond had been in their youth among the first and greatest of dancers. Too portly now to endure sustained effort with his feet, he was yet an excellent instructor, and I was constantly under his training. He taught me, in addition to the legitimate slights of our calling, to aid him in a droll way he had of amusing himself at the expense of the general public. He initiated me into the mysteries of beating the rolls and drags on the snare drum. And then it was our custom of a summer afternoon to steal away to the top of the hotel, or more generally to the roof of the hall where we were to exhibit. Placing ourselves so that we could observe the passers-by on the street without being observed by them, Lynch would strike up a tune on the fife, and I would accompany him on the drum, and straightaway the whole thoroughfare for a block or so in each direction would keep time to our music. It was our delight to set our people all a-going faster or slower at our will. Curious persons would sometimes look about them, puzzled, to see where the music came from, but failing in that they almost invariably marched on to some brisk or melancholy measure as a chance to be our mood at the moment. Anyone who may doubt this statement has but to observe the foot-passengers the next time he or she hears a band of music playing on the street. It would sometimes happen, however, that our notice would be attracted by the peculiar walk of an individual who had so little music in his soul that we could not bring him into step. In that case we would perform Muhammad's Miracle of the Mountain by accommodating our fife and drum to his particular gate and bringing the rest of the street into the same pace. If we saw an elderly gentleman or lady, Lynch would immediately launch forth into the well-known limping tune of the old man in the pantomime, and, as sure as fate, our venerable actor or actress below would keep time. The conventional air which heralds in Columbine on the Christmas boards was also brought into requisition, with most remarkable effect when we caught sight of a young lady or bevy of young ladies promenading beneath us in spruce toilette. On a hot day, I am afraid we were sometimes a trifle cruel in the way we hurried up fleshy people. From our point of view on the roof and generally behind a shady chimney the effect was, in truth, not unlike that of a diorama. But especially was this the case when some stout old gentleman whom we had precipitated along a whole block at a very lively perspiring rate through a hot sun would, as if melted or absorbed in the white light, disappear suddenly from our gaze, as a brisk and fiery execution of the girl I left behind me would carry him steaming around a corner. In short, our martial music was an endless amusement to us when time hung heavy on the hands of the more dignified members of our company. By some accident, I forget what, we lost our small drum and were afterward confined to a fife and a bass drum. This, I think, only made the effect of our music more ludicrous in developing the peculiarities of individual pedestrians. Lynch seemed, I remember, more than ever satisfied in this exigency, for he stoutly maintained that any two faces are more alike than any two gates, and that, for his part, he always wanted the top of a house, a fife, and at least a bass drum, to read character. Lynch and I were together in another troupe afterward. I never knew him in all the time of our association to talk ten minutes without telling some story, and that always about something which had happened to him personally in the show business. In the long nights, when we had to wait for cars or steamboats, he would sit down, and taking up one theme, would string all his stories on that, and that alone, for hours. His manner would make the merest commonplace amusing. We had been together a year or more, I think, when Barnum's autobiography came out. I shall never forget my comrade's indignation when he read that passage of the book which runs something in this way. Here I picked up one Francis Lynch, an orphan vagabond, etc., etc. It was really dangerous after that for a man to own, in his presence, to having read the life of the great showman. Henceforth Lynch omitted all his stories about the time when he and P. T. Barnum used to black their faces together. Lynch professed to live in Boston, though he had not been there in fifteen years. During all this time he had been earnestly trying to get back to his home. He would often spend money enough in a night to take him to Boston from almost any place in the broad union and back again, and then lament his folly for the next week. Once he left our company at Cleveland, Ohio, for the express purpose of going back to Boston, unfortunately a night intervened, and in the middle of it the whole weddle-house was aroused from its slumbers by poor Lynch in the last stage of intoxication, vociferating at the top of his lungs, but he had been robbed of the money with which he was going back to Boston. By some means he had got a hold of a lighted candle without a candlestick, and with this he proposed to search the house. The clerks and porters were called out of bed and led by Lynch with his flickering taper came in melancholy procession up the long stairs to the rooms occupied by our troop. Lynch insisted that we should all be searched, a whim in which under the circumstances we thought it best to humor him. This having been done without finding his lost treasure, he bolted the doors and proceeded to examine the surprised clerks and porters. Meeting with the same ill success he finally threw himself into spare upon his bed and wailed himself to sleep. The next morning he found all the money which he had not spent in the side pocket of his overcoat, where he had carelessly thrusted himself, and his joy was so great at this, and his sorrow so lively when told that he had searched us all, that he insisted on spending what money was left to celebrate his good luck and the triumph of our honesty. Lynch never got back to Boston. He died several years ago somewhere out in the far west. Since then it has transpired that Barnum was wrong in calling him an orphan, at least, for his father sought him a long time before hearing of his death to bestow upon the poor fellow a considerable fortune that had been left him by some relative. Johnny Booker was the stage manager of the company with which I left Toledo. Our first business manager and proprietor was a noble-hearted fellow who has since distinguished himself as a colonel in the late war. But the manager ship changed hands after a while, and we finally arrived at Pittsburgh. Here we played a week to poor houses, and on one morning awoke to find that our manager had decamped without paying our hotel bills. When this became known through the papers, or in some other way, the landlord got out an attachment on our baggage. The troop was disbanded, of course. When, therefore, I desired to take my trunk and go home, the hotelkeeper told me that I could do so as soon as I paid the bills of the whole company. This was appalling. After a great deal of wrangling the landlord was convinced at last that he could hold us responsible only for our individual indebtedness. Accordingly Mr. Booker, Mr. Neeland, a violinist and myself were allowed to pay our bills and depart with our baggage. I never learned exactly how the greater part of the company escaped, but it certainly could not have been by discharging their accounts, for they were generally of that reckless disposition which scorns to have any cash on hand or to remember where it has been deposited. The sentimental ballad singer, the one who was the most careful of his scarves, the set of his attire, and the combing and curling of his hair, and who used to volunteer to stand at the door in the early part of the evening and pass programs to the ladies as they came into the hall, this languishing fellow, I am sorry to say, was obliged to leave his trunks and the greater part of his wardrobe behind him in the hands of the inexorable landlord. Frank Lynch had led this nomadic life so long that he never carried any trunk with him. He had already sacrificed too much, he averred, to the rapaciousness of hotel keepers and the villainy of fly-by-night managers. He contented himself, therefore, with two champagne baskets, one of which, containing his stage wardrobe, always went directly to the hall where we were to play, while the other, containing his linen, went to the hotel where, in company with the baggage of the whole troupe, it excited no suspicion. Whether or not Lynch left one of his champagne baskets with the Pittsburgh landlord, I cannot say. I am sure, however, when we met afterward, I could not detect that his wardrobe had diminished in the least. Indeed, there was this remarkable quality about the two champagne baskets in which the convivial parapetetic may be said to have lived, that their contents never seemed either to diminish or increase. End of Chapter 3 The Fate of the Serenaders VIII. The Trials and Triumphs of the Booker Troupe The two gentlemen with whom I left Pittsburgh accompanied me to Toledo, where Mr. Booker set to work to get up another company. It was not long till we heard of Lynch at Cincinnati in search of an engagement, and he was accordingly sent for. Mr. Edwin Dives, also a member of the defunct Serenaders, and now, by the way, a gray-haired wood engraver and scenic artist at San Francisco, was brought from some other place, and the Booker Troupe set out on its travels. This company prided itself on its sobriety and gentlemanly conduct. It was the business of the four other members to keep poor Lynch straight, and if, in the endeavor, some of them occasionally fell themselves, it was put down to the reckless good fellowship of the merry veteran and hushed up as expeditiously as possible. There were so few of us that we could afford to go to smaller towns than the other troupe had ever visited. It was deemed a good advertisement, as well as in some metaphysical way conducive to the morale of the company, to dress as nearly alike as we could when off the stage. This had the effect, as will be readily understood, of pointing me out more prominently than ever as the juvenile prodigy whose portrait and assumed name were plastered about over the walls of the towns and cities through which we took our triumphal march. The first part of our performances we gave with white faces, and I had so improved my opportunities that I was now able to appear as the scotch girl in plaid petticoats who executes the inevitable Highland Fling in such exhibitions. By practicing in my room through many tedious days I learned to knock and spin and toss about the tambourine on the end of my forefinger, and, having rehearsed a budget of stale jokes, I was promoted to one of the end men in the first part of the Negro performances. Lynch, who could do anything from a solo on the penny trumpet to an obligato on the double bass, was at the same time advanced to play the second violin, as this made more music and helped fill up the stage. In addition to my jig, I now appeared in all sorts of pout-a-deux, took the principal lady part in Negro ballets, and danced Lucy Long. I am told that I looked the wench admirably. Indeed, I have always considered it a substantiation of this fact, rather than an evidence of his maudlin condition, that a year or so subsequently a planter in one of the southern states insisted on purchasing me from the door-tender at one of our exhibitions. The price he offered and the earnestness and apparent good faith in which he offered it were so flattering that I have always regretted the necessity in which the door-tender at last considered himself of kicking that planter downstairs. The Booker troupe wandered all over the western country, travelling at all hours of night and day, and in all manner of conveyances, from the best to the worst. The life was so exciting, and I was so young, that I was probably as happy as an itinerant mortal can be in this world of belated railway trains, steamboat explosions and collisions, and runaway stage-horses. In the smaller cities and towns we would sometimes, by particular request, end up the evening with a ball. While we were washing the burnt cork from our faces, the ushers would remove the seats, and for a certain fee those ladies and gentlemen who delighted in the dance were readmitted to the hall. Then the four adults of the troupe, attired in their very best citizens' dress, as they called it, would discourse music for the dancers. My musical incompetency was, at these times, a signal advantage to me, for I was left free to go into society. I danced a great deal and with considerable ecla on such occasions. My salary, which increased gradually with my progress in the profession, was at this period squandered almost entirely upon my back. I was under the impression that my importation of metropolitan cuts and fashions into those provincial places was something altogether killing. My jewellery, if I remember well, was just simply astonishing for a boy of my age. From these towns where we had dancing parties I always went away with love affairs on my hands. The amount of gold rings which I exchanged with young ladies between the ages of eleven and thirteen years was, to say the least, extraordinary. Sunday in a small city is generally a heavy day with your minstrel. He writes to his wife, if he has any, or, if he has none, he practices solos on the bass vial or some other instrument that ought never to be played solo, or yawns or lounges about the common room of the company. I used to pass these days, I am sorry to say, in replying to voluminous, ill-spelled correspondence from young persons with whom I had danced a week or so back, and if I happened to have a flame in the same town I would go to church with the very reprehensible motive of seeing her or walking home with her. I ought to have known that this was highly improper conduct, even if the simple appearance of a negro minstrel at church had not almost invariably produced great scandal to the congregation. I am glad, however, to be able to add that my toilet and behaviour in such places were always scrupulously careful. I do not know whether it is quite seemly in me to tell of it, but during the past winter I had occasion to lecture in a town which had once been the scene of one of these erotic exploits. And there were, sitting in a row on a front seat in the audience, not only the quantum heroine and the gentleman who has for many years been her husband, but her father and mother, and, worst of all, that brother of hers who intercepted our letters and who had threatened profanely to punch my head. Now, although our attachment had been of the most harmlessly juvenile kind, the reader will imagine my embarrassment when I had the honour of an introduction to this whole family, and when the past was talked over by them in the most ruthlessly philosophical manner. At a certain county seat in Michigan the Booker Troupe had a remarkable bout with a moral editor. There must be many persons in that county, especially of the legal fraternity, who yet remember at least the catastrophe of the strange affair. This is the way it happened, as nearly as I can recall it. There were two weekly papers published in that town at the time. Our agent had given our advertisement to one of these papers, and the other, without authority, had copied it. When the bills were brought to be paid, that of the paper which had printed our advertisement without warrant, was about three times as much as the regular price, or as the other paper had charged. To Mr. Booker's remonstrance it was answered that the exorbitant bill must be paid. That shows were immoral things anyway, and that it was the purpose of that particular weekly newspaper to put them down. This was the moral editor who spoke. Mr. Booker offered him the same amount that the other paper had charged, and bluntly refused to give a cent more. The moral editor would not take a cent less than his first charges, and in default of immediate payment would get out an attachment. Now the constable, in common with most of the citizens, sympathized with Mr. Booker. In fact, the red nose and generally dissipated air of the moral editor made decidedly against the honesty of his intentions and the missionary of reform. And thus it happened, by some intentional delay in the making out of the papers, that the constable and the creditor arrived at the station to attach our baggage just at the time when it was all carefully stowed away in the baggage car, and when the train was moving off with us on board. The editor, in great rage, notwithstanding his mission as moral censor, indulged in a great deal of profanity by way of making it the better understood that he would follow us to the ends of the earth as soon as he could get the proper warrant made out. Our next stopping place was a brisk little town which chanced to be in the same county. We exhibited there and slipped away to our next point on a midnight train, leaving Mr. Booker behind to encounter the attachment, which, from private advices, we were led to expect the following morning. The officer accosted Mr. Booker as he was getting on the train, and asked him if an old weather-beaten valise which he carried in his hand was his. It was, and that was all the baggage he had with him, the rest having gone on, of course, with us, by the night train. With imposing formality the old weather-beaten valise was attached. The key was also given up. I do not know whether to the officer or to a lawyer who had come up from the county seat to advise us in the matter. The lawyer then and there in the presence of the officer and of the interested spectators was entrusted formally with the case, and Mr. Booker joining us in a few hours thereafter we proceeded unmolested on our travels. The justice and the council on both sides seemed to have entered into the affair with the design of getting all the sport they could out of it. On the day of the trial the courtroom was thronged. In the absence of witnesses for the defence, and I suppose also by collusion, the case went against the Booker troop. The editor, who was of course present, was in great glee. At this stage of the proceedings it has been related, I know not how truly, the justice arose, and in the most solemn manner spoke of the case as peculiarly aggressive on the part of a company of itinerant showmen, and inasmuch as their fellow citizen had taken it upon himself, single-handed, to drive this growing evil out of the land, therefore the magistrate ordered, although it was a little informal, that the constable without further delay, which had in the tardy course of justice been too long already, should in the presence of that court open the valise and proceed to the sale of its contents. The face of the moral editor is reported to have beamed more brightly than ever at this stage of his triumph. With much pomp and circumstance the key was produced, and the ragged valise brought forward and opened. As nearly as I can remember from having been present at the packing, and from an account of the affair sent to us afterward, the constable then began with grave deliberation to draw forth from that discouraged old portmanteau the following articles, to it one large brick, one quart of beans, one silk hat without rim or lining, three pounds potatoes, which latter had sprouted in the delays of justice, one old boot, one letter of congratulations to the moral editor, which was read in open court, and worst of all, one life-size woodcut representation of Mr. Booker himself, with an old valise in one hand, and a superannuated umbrella in the other, as he was want to appear in his wonderful plantation act of the smoke-house reel. During the slow exposure of each of these articles, one after the other, there was some attempt to keep order in the court, but by the time the last one was reached, even the attempt was abandoned. The scene became uproarious, and the court was adjourned. The moral editor never heard the last of it. He was forced to sell out his reformatory newspaper and leave the town. We were on our way east from Chicago, exhibiting at the towns along the line of the Michigan Central Railroad, when Ephraim came to us. Ephraim was one of the most comical specimens of the Negro species. We were playing at Marshall, Michigan, when he introduced himself to our notice by bringing water into the dressing-room, blacking our boots, and in other ways making himself useful. He had the blackest face, largest mouth, and whitest teeth imaginable. He said there was nothing in the world which he would like so well as to travel with a show. What could he do? Why, he could fetch water, black our boots, and take care of our baggage. We assured him that we could not afford to have a servant travel with us. Ephraim rejoined that he did not want any pay, he just wanted to go with a show. We told him it was simply impossible, and Ephraim went away as we thought, discouraged. The next morning, as we were getting into the railway car, whom should we discover there before us? But Ephraim, with his baggage under his arm, a glazed traveling bag of so attenuated an appearance that it could not possibly have had anything in it but its lining, to the question as to whither he was bound, he replied, Why, bless you, I was going with the show! Again he was told that it could not be, and made to get out of the car. This occurrence gave Mr. Lynch the theme for a long series of stories about people he had met, who were what he called showstruck, and with these narratives our time was beguiled till we reached the town at which we were to perform that night. As we walked out toward the baggage car, what was our surprise to see Ephraim there picking out and piling up our trunks, and bestowing sundry loud and expressive epithets upon the baggage master, who had let a property box fall upon the platform. I think we laughed louder now than we had at any of Mr. Lynch's stories. Ephraim deigned not to notice us or our mirth, but having picked out the baggage that went to the hall where we were to exhibit, he called a drae and rode away with it. He made himself of great use during our stay in that place, in return for which his slight hotel expenses were paid, but he was told positively that he could go no farther. We knew that he had no money, yet did not dare to give him any, lest he should be enabled to follow us to the next town. So when we came to go away, we expressed our regrets to the ingenious Darkie, and once more, bad him good-bye. He disappeared in the crowd, and the train moved off. When we arrived at the next town, here, there again was Ephraim, at the baggage car, giving his stentorian commands about our trunks and properties, and taking not the least notice of the surprise depicted on our faces. The discharge and mysterious reappearance of Ephraim occurred in about the same manner at every town along the road until we reached Detroit. We never could find out how he got from place to place on the cars, but where our baggage was, there was Ephraim also. We had to succumb. His persistency and faithfulness and perfect good nature carried the point, and he became a regular attaché of the Booker Troop. The story of the fights and beatings that poor Ephraim sustained in his jealous care of our luggage would alone make a long chapter. He was always at Fisticuffs with the Irish porters of the hotels. On one occasion, when remonstrated with for his excessive pugnacity, Ephraim explained himself in this way. For one slam of a trunk I gently speaks to a man. For two slams I calls him a thief, and when it comes to three slams, then there's going to be somebody knocked down. Now you hear me. On our arrival at the hotel in Detroit, we observed that the porter was an Irishman, and we're really surprised that he and Ephraim did not quarrel in handling the baggage. An anomaly which was satisfactorily explained to us afterward by the fact that the porter had lately come to this country and was, moreover, only about half-witted. Now Ephraim was in the habit of taking his meals in the kitchens, and of sleeping in whatever attic was assigned him. On our first night in Detroit he had been sent into the servants' chamber, somewhere in the topmost part of the hotel. Ephraim ascended, disrobed himself, and with his usual recklessness got into the first of the many beds he saw in the large room. At twelve o'clock when his watch was over the Irish porter also proceeded to the same apartment with the purpose of retiring. Opening the door he discovered by the dim gaslight something dark on the pillow of his own bed. This brought all his old world superstition into play in a moment. Going as much nearer as he dared he saw that it was a black head, and believing firmly that the devil was black he was sure that the devil was in his bed. The affrighted porter gave an unearthly yelp at which Ephraim started up in terror, whereupon the Irishman seized one of the negro's boots from the floor by the foot of the bed, and fell to beating the supposed devil over the head with all his might. The attack was so sudden that Ephraim never thought of defense, but, springing to his feet, fled precipitately down the six flights of stairs out into the middle of the street crying, Watch! Watch! at the top of his voice. Here a policeman came along and took poor Ephraim off to the station-house, just as he was, and in spite of all his protestations of innocence. The next morning Mr. Booker carried his clothes to the unfortunate negro, and brought him back to the hotel. End of Chapter 4 The Trials and Triumphs of the Booker Troop Section 15 of Vagabond Adventures. Vagabond Adventures by Ralph Keeler. Book II. Three years as a negro minstrel. Chapter 5. The Last of the Booker Troop. In the course of time the Booker Troop was disbanded, and Ephraim, as well as ourselves, was, in green room parlance, out of an engagement. I never saw him or Lynch afterward. Mr. Edwin D. was, as I have intimated, is an industrious maker of woodcuts and painter of transparencies and theatrical allusions in San Francisco. He was the gentlemanly middleman and baritone of this company. I never met him professionally after our disbanding. He went to California, I believe, with the late Samuel Wells, in the same troupe with Messer's Birch and Bacchus. Deves was a very handsome man in the old days of our association. His jet-black hair never required a wig at that time, except when he desired to personate some terrible impresario in burlesque opera. Then he would invest himself in one of Buffalo robe, and would roar with such unexampled fierceness that our tin horns would ring again with the mere echoes of his powerful voice. He was a man of great versatility. I would not like to say exactly what he could not do from the invention of a patent soap to the plotting of a new pantomime. The words and music of some of the most widely known of the old Negro melodies are of his composition. But as I saw him last with his large family around him at San Francisco, it was evident that if he should ever go back from his present contented, peaceful life into the checkered uncertainties of cork opera, he would have to wear a wig unless he confined himself exclusively to old man's parts. His hair has long since faded, and he would, I fear, have also to use a tin horn himself to produce the startling echoes of his whileum unaided voice. With Mr. Neelan, the violinist and musical director of the Booker Troop, I traveled subsequently in two other companies. As I shall have no occasion to mention him again, I will say here that he was a quiet, modest sort of fellow who had a remarkable talent for sleeping. That man could sleep at any time and in any place. If he happened to be forgotten in the hurry of changing conveyances, which was not infrequently the case, he was sure to be left snoring in some waiting room or crouched down among the cushions in some railway-coach with his violin-box for a pillow. He alone always played for my jigs and hornpipes, and as I used to get a side view of him on the stage, with his eyes shot and his heel beating the measure of the ecstasy which at such moments traveled, for instance, the rocky road to Dublin, away up into the cirrus heaven of the octaves, I was more than once impressed with the annoying belief that he was asleep, or soon would be, and that I should have to complete my grand finale of wings and shuffles to the uncertain fugue of his snoring. Whether he ever did fall asleep or not on the stage I cannot tell for sure, but asleep or awake he always managed to keep better time than I did. He practised Di Berlio's seventh air for six months almost constantly in his room, never to my knowledge venturing to play it in public. Now his room was generally the next one to mine, and I have often wished, after three or four steady hours of Di Berlio, that Mr. Neeland would fall asleep, yet by a strange fatality he never did, unless there was some likelihood of his being left behind. Nevertheless, Neeland was, by all odds, the best-natured and the most substantial man of the Booker Troop. He is now, I hear, the thrifty and honest possessor of a goodly farm in Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife and children. Of late years it is only when the crops are poor or the monotony of rural pursuits leaves him open to the temptation that he abandons his plough, like another sturdy Cincinnati's, to give his services to the public. Then, for a brief summer he will, it is said, sally forth to lead the brass and string band of some circus or minagerie to the conquest of bucolic or urban ears and fractional currency. After a whole season of ovations in which captive elephants and camels and lions, or superb bandwagons and grand entries and bareback equestrians have moved to the time of his music, the honest Neeland goes back to his cows and sheep and domestic hearth and is happy. Johnny Booker still lives. I meet him every few years in the most out of the way and unexpected places. He confines himself now, I believe, exclusively to the circus or minagerie business. One or the other branch of this style of tent life seems, by the way, to be the ultimate refuge of your old showman, the last stage of his worldly transmigrations. Some seasons I will come across Mr. Booker in the very heart of this continent, convulsing a rural community with the sparkling manner in which he will answer, as clown, to the conventional, this way, Mr. Merryman, ask the young lady what she will have now. At other seasons, and on the remotest rim of our territorial possessions, I will be astonished to recognize him in the magniliquent ringmaster, who inflicts the lashes upon the painted clown, and who acts the part of the Greek chorus, explaining the jokes of that amusing fellow in the choicest Doric of our language. I have even known him to deliver a moral and instructive lecture on the nature and habits of the elephant in a grand combination minagerie. Indeed, it was his custom every afternoon and evening to discourse on this branch of natural history when I last met my old friend and instructor in Minstrelsea. He took great interest in his elephant, and especially in a living hippopotamus, which was the ruling attraction of his establishment, just as he had once, I am bound and gratitude to say, taken great interest in me. My place, as his pupil, was just then usurped by a small Irish lad whom he pointed out to me in an expansive, feminine wig of flaxen curls and in pure old tights and tunic, with a most formidable gold-foil battle-axe in one hand, and the American flag in the other, personating, as Mr. Booker assured me, a water-nymph on the silver-scaled, but somewhat shaky chariot of Neptune. This imposing car of the sea-god, I need scarcely add, formed part of the procession as it entered town, headed by the elephant, the living hippopotamus, and a brass band, seemingly on the point of death, so red and distended was the face of each strangling musician, and so nearly did each appear to have poured through the mellow horn his pensive soul. The procession was still passing the balcony of the hotel on which we were standing, when Mr. Booker confided to me, very gravely, that his present pupil did not give him satisfaction. He will never be a performer, said the thoughtful veteran. I don't know what I can make of that boy, for pursued Mr. Booker, with his mind evidently more upon his pupil than upon me, for I don't think he is even fit to write books. My former manager at this moment became so suddenly absorbed in the contemplation of a large spot on the very masculine tunic of his charge, the water-nymph, that he did not notice how frank he had been with me. It is due, however, to the magnanimity of Mr. Booker to say that whatever may be his private opinion of literature and of my change of profession we are, and I hope always shall be, the most devoted of friends. Whenever we meet he is sure to startle me with the new batch of reminiscences of our old-time companionship. What puzzles me most is that, as he advances in years, his accounts of my youthful exploits grow more extended and apocryphal. He has long since in these narratives got out of the horizon of my memory. I would not for the world accuse my old instructor of a want of candor, but I must say I think he has confounded me with other and later of his pupils. It would be as useless as ill-mannered to contradict him, for he has told these stories so often that he believes them implicitly himself. Any unbiased mind, moreover, will find excuse for the treachery of his memory in the devious and exciting course of his subsequent life as cariffius of the saw-dusty ring, and especially as the zoologist of the living hippopotamus, and as the moral lecturer upon the manners and customs of the elephant. I shall, however, in closing this account of the Booker Troop, give a couple of condensed samples, which will, I think, of themselves explain why I indulge in no more of Mr. Booker's stories about myself. I give them as a simple act of justice to my old comrades. Having related my reminiscences of them with great freedom, it is no more than fair that one of them, at least, should be heard against me. While admitting that a boy of thirteen may not have all the discretion in the world, still I herewith enter the solemn protest of my memory against the facts of the following statements. Mr. Booker says that in the course of our travels we came to a city where I had relatives, and that I took occasion, as the best means of impressing them with my prosperity and independence, to appear in a different suit of clothes as often as I visited them, which was two or three times a day. He furthermore relates with appalling circumstantiality that at a select hop after our performances in some quiet little city my attention was attracted by a very pretty young lady who seemed to be the bell of the evening. With the interested swagger of a young blood of thirteen years I asked who that fine girl was. I was told that she was a certain Miss So-and-so, whom for the sake of Mr. Booker's story we will call Miss Brown, and that she was of a very respectable family in that city. Now it happened, in the course of our wanderings, that from motives of curiosity, charity, and advertisement combined we always visited the state prisons which chanced to be in our route, and sang and played to the prisoners generally while they were assembled at dinner. And I may add here, by way of parenthesis, that never elsewhere have I witnessed so wonderful an illustration of the power of music as greeted us on such occasions. Hundreds would change from laughter to tears and from tears to laughter again as the song or strain was merry or sad. Two or three weeks before the time of Mr. Booker's story we had, he says, visited one of these prisons, and we had all become very much interested in the case of a handsome young fellow who had just been brought there for some crime committed while under the influence of liquor. As soon as I heard the young lady's name I remembered all about this unfortunate young fellow, and especially that he bore the same surname and came originally from that very town, although he had been convicted in another state. I found by inquiry that she, the handsome young lady, and life of the whole company, was the sister of the criminal. It was very plain that she had not yet heard of her brother's misfortune. Then according to Mr. Booker's account I obtained an introduction to her, and, boy-like, in the honest but inconsiderate delight of being the first to bear her news which she, doubtless, would want to hear, I said, Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown, your brother's in the penitentiary. The young lady swooned, of course, and was born home by her friends. Mr. Booker always adds at this place that I ought to have been taken out and thrashed, an opinion in which I should agree heartily, if I did not doubt the truth of the whole story. CHAPTER VI During the time I was waiting for another engagement I wandered to a large western city, and took board in a respectable private family. There were three unmarried daughters in this household, the youngest of whom could not, I think, have been less than twenty-six years old. Notwithstanding the disparity of our ages, my memory is very much at fault if I was not in love with all three of these ladies at once. Nothing else, at least, could account to me, now, for the regularity with which I conducted this mature trio to theatres and concerts. From their readiness to go, four and five evenings a week, I am also led to conclude that they individually and collectively encouraged my suit. What names these three weird sisters bore, and how they looked, are matters which have long since escaped me, but the alacrity with which they would go to, ice-cream saloons in the afternoon, or to places of amusement in the evening at my expense, made such an impression on my purse at the time that I have not forgotten it as you see to this day. I know not in what this state of affairs would have ended had it not been for a professional engagement tendered me in the myths of my prodigality. Before leaving that city I have a faint remembrance of having formed one of a band of two or three who undertook to furnish the amusement for a grand gift enterprise. Finally I found myself, after some minor adventures, at Cincinnati, where the once notorious Mike Mitchell left the Campbell's minstrels and took me with him into a company which he organized there, under the title of The Mitchells. We played some time at the largest hall in Cincinnati, boarding the while at the Gibson House. At this hotel I became acquainted with a chubby, handsome boy, about as tall as I was, who excited my admiration in an extraordinary manner. He would go to the theatre, or some place of amusement, every evening, and, nevertheless, get up at four or five o'clock every morning. I burned with a desire to wrestle with that boy. This occurred to me as the only way to gratify my curiosity and establish a droll theory I had that any lad who could do with so little sleep must be a young giant. At last I unveiled him into my room, and the greater part of my remaining days in Cincinnati were spent in that cheerful and invigorating style of contest to the no-little damage of the furniture and our clothes, and of the nerves of a rheumatic old bachelor who occupied the apartment just under us. There could have been nothing of the giant in the boy, after all, since we were so evenly matched, and, somehow, my belief in his wonderful sleeplessness was sadly dissipated. Whether he subsequently told me himself, or I found out by personal observation I have forgotten, but I learned at last to account for his power of early rising in a way only less remarkable than the physical endurance of which I had thought him capable. This young gentleman, it seems, was in the habit of going to sleep in his seat at the theatre, just after the overture by the orchestra. What struck me as particularly astonishing was that he always had the faculty of waking up when the dancing and comic songs came in, and especially when the broadsword and other combats took place. A tragedian never died to slow music in his presence, but the young gentleman's critical eye, refreshed and sharpened by recent repose, was upon him. In a word, whatsoever the act or scene in which it occurred, my young friend was always in at the death, and he seemed to know by instinct, without consulting a ponderous gold watch which he carried, when it was time for the play to end. Thus it will be seen he went away from the theatre with his night's rest already half complete, and was able to arise at four or five the next morning, and deliver to any chance-comer throughout the day a reliable opinion on the best points made the evening previous by Jameson or Murdoch, the actors of those times, in the great scene wherein McDuff lays on. Or this young gentleman could tell you, perhaps, the number of times the blades struck fire in the mighty broadsword battle, sustained single-handed against fearful odds by Mrs. Wilkinson in the French spy. In the course of time our company started on its travels through the neighbouring states, and when we returned to Cincinnati my young friend and fellow wrestler was gone, moved away with his parents from the hotel I was told and to another city. Now, what has made this reminiscence especially interesting, at least to me, was my next meeting with the subject of it, years and years after afterward, because that was one of the strange occurrences which are, after all, about as frequent in an adventurous life as they are in fiction. At a little inn in the shadow of the Urtenwald, not far from the Rhine, I had the pleasure of taking him the next time by the hand. We have since passed many a day together, on the Iser, and Sain, and Tiber, and we have slept many a night in the most uninviting of Auberg, and Gusthauser, and not there, I am proud to say, or in his hospitable mansion on Michigan Avenue or, late at night, in the office of the great newspaper which he helps to edit, have I ever, in his generous manhood, discovered any sleeping on his post, or sleeplessness off from it. There were, in the Mitchells, more discordant elements than I recollect to have known in any other troupe in the fortunes of which I ever had a part. I think there were too many leading comedians and musical stars among us for anything so sober and dull as a good understanding to exist at all times. Someone, you know, must play second parts and second violin, and that necessity was a smothered volcano in our midst. Stale jokes unuttered, sit heavily on your comedian's memory. They must be refreshed or renewed by the laughter of an audience, and, eclipsed musical brilliancy, when turned in upon itself, illumines a very disagreeable void and generally results in heart-burnings. I have a lingering impression that I, myself, in this company, sighed regretfully for my old place as tambourinist and end-man. There were three other tambourinists and end-men who, like myself, had been professionally cut short in a comic career to make way for a person whose jokes, in our opinion, were not half so good as ours, and for whose acrobatics, with the complicated tambourine itself, we were united as three men and one boy in our sublime contempt. We had, as musical director, a very young Italian who had led the orchestra of the Grand Opera at Havana, and he managed to lead our musicians into the most unconscionable difficulties and misunderstandings. I cannot conceive how, in the world, he did it, but he had them continually by the ears. At one rehearsal there was such a jealous millet that a veteran violinist, an irascible old German, was forced to leave his wig behind him on the stage and retreat precipitately, with no more hair on his head than there is on a hairdresser's block. Indeed, as his smooth occiput disappeared through the dressing-room door, it resembled nothing so much as a back view of one of those familiar ornaments of a wickmaker's window. The business manager of this company was a character that has puzzled me a great deal, a human riddle that I saw of a new way every time I attempted. The last solution, too, is always sure to be just contrary to the one immediately proceeding. The name of this mustached sphinx was Governor Dore, or that, at least, was the name he went under, how he got or what right he had to, either his title or surname, I do not know. He had gambled for thousands in California and been an adventurer in every land. He knew Shakespeare, seemingly, by heart. His common conversation was full of detergent phrase and movement of melodrama. His presence anywhere was a constant sensation. There was a strange mixture of treachery and generous good fellowship in the expression of his face. When younger, before a long course of dissipation had left its mark upon him, he must have been very handsome. He was yet tall and tolerably erect, and the excessive measure of the liquor he had consumed showed itself not so much in his face as in that peculiar bend to the knees when walking, which the acute observer will always find the surest test of the confirmed bacchanalian. There is a kind of life that never gets into books, a species of villainy that floats ethereally just above the atmosphere of the courts. The newspaper reporter does not quite grasp it, and so it remains without its literature. Of a quarter-century or more of this indescribable sort of life, Governor Doar had skinned the cream, as I may say. All that was worldly he knew from the infinitesimal series of negative physical pleasures to the most abstruse calculus of positive crime. The idea of a virtuous home, of children, and of scenes that are so common in everyday life was, to him, I am sure, a memory of remote years. He saw all these things from the outside, and lived, even in his most lavish prosperity, in the very worst of homelessness. Yet I have seen him manifest simplicity as honest as a child's, and a tenderness in which there could be no counterfeit. I think I have never known a man on whom a striking scene in nature had so powerful an effect. He would look upon a beautiful or wild landscape for hours at a time. There could have been no affectation in this, for he rarely expressed his admiration audibly, and when he did it was in some brief exclamation that was forcible or original. I shall always remember the evening when we sat upon the quarter-deck of a steamboat at a backwood's landing on one of the great western rivers where, for some reason, we were detained. We were sitting alone, I think. It was nearly midnight, and there was scarcely a cloud in the heavens or a ripple in the water. The moon was shining grandly, duplicating in shadow the thick forests for miles along the stream. The governor had been looking in silence at the magnificent scene for as much as a half hour when I took occasion to remark that I thought I would go to my stateroom. The words were scarcely uttered when he startled me by jumping suddenly to his feet and exclaiming his voice all a quiver, great God! A man does not see three such nights as this in a lifetime. How can you—how can they sleep? I shall not go to bed till the moon does. And as I left him he sat down again with a determined yet injured look of one who had been insulted through nature. The governor liked to pass for a great literary character, and I believe he succeeded in his ambition among his peculiar associates. By a lucky chance I have found, between the leaves of an old diary which I kept spasmodically at that time, a specimen of his production. It is an elaborate life of Michael Mitchell, the comedian and dancer. I cut it out of a Cincinnati paper, the commercial, if I am not mistaken, and I am not sure that I did not once admire it almost as much as I did the governor himself. I see now, by the light of greater technical knowledge in such matters, that this rare bit of biography was printed bodily as an advertisement. It has, after the manner of special patent medicine notices, communicated, just over it, in brackets. I observe too that it has at the left-hand bottom corner these cabalistic signs, D-L-T. I am glad, nevertheless, to be able to give an extract or so. The opening sentence has, as will be seen, a striking though inadvertent allusion to one of the games with which the old gambler was doubtless much more familiar than he could have been with the hazardous Latin. The subject of this sketch, writes the biographer, was born in Ireland, on the 20th of November on Odomany, 1831. A more extended extract, taken at random, say, from his account of Mitchell's first triumph, will be all that is needed as a specimen of the governor's average literary manner. It is better still, however, as an autobiographical reminiscence of the biographer himself, or, perhaps I should say as a photograph of his own picturesque mind. You will observe how his style reeks of the drama and yellow-covered memories. That was the exact manner of his ordinary conversation. It cannot be that he has weathered the years which have intervened since he made this contribution to literature, but it will always have this peculiarity for me, that I shall never read it without seeing the old adventurer living and swaggering before me the same insolvable riddle in human nature. Here is the paragraph. We next find Mike in the difficult situation of vocalist and bone player. He becomes a troubadour the 10th of March, 1842, a day sacred to men of genius, for on that day Tyrone Power, that excellent wit and comedian, left the shores of this country on the ill-fated president, never to return. On that identical day there was bustle and excitement in the castle of the Mitchells, number 222 Greenwich Street, New York City. Young Michael was to be comparisoned and enter the lists, armed, capipai, as a knight or troubadour of olden times, V. James. The eventful eve of that eventful day arrived precisely at nightfall, at the moment that old Trinity proclaimed with brazen notes the hour of 7 p.m. There issued from the outer gate of the Mitchells' guarded palace a youth armed with four bones. The knight looked lowering, as dark as fate itself. No portents were in the sky, no Corsican brothers' illusions, but something made our hero tremble. It was the uncertainty of the future. Sustaining himself with a glass of root beer, he made his way through the obscurity of the gas light to a dilapidated house. Number 450 Broadway gave the counter sign or word of the night, Daniel Tucker Esquire. The door flew open at the magical sound, and Michael entered. At first sight of the interior of that magnificent arena, our hero's cheek slightly paled and well it might. The chamber of horrors of Madame Tassaron could not move the redoubtable Michael now, for he has grown bold in his profession. But on that night, armed only with youth and bones, surrounded by a live rattlesnake, a six-legged horse, three ladies in wax, the counterpart of three of flesh that had shuffled off this mortal coil by the hands of midnight murderers—SIC. Six little orphan boys armed all with bones, and looking precious hungry, and seated on six little chairs, a seventh-chair vacant for Mike himself, like that of Banquo's. Six junk-bottles with six tallow candles therein, throwing their furtive, flickering melancholy light upon these cadaverous and superannuated tarman musicians, playing upon bass drum, cracked fife, and hurdy-gurdy. No wonder that poor Mike's blood rushed to his heart and that he trembled in his boots, the sight would have intimidated stronger and older artists. The trio commenced their overture, the music, that beautiful air, the light of other days, poor fellows the light of their days had surely faded, they were blind, and as they proceeded with their soul-stirring drum and ear-pacing fife, Mike recovered his self-possession. The martial music over, and the Germans having retired to the shades of a lager beer saloon, Michael's turn came next. Taking the vacant chair and seating himself thereon he drew his American castanets, the younger brother of the Banquo, from his pocket. He had but one at that time, and threw himself in an attitude to sustain himself for the coming fray. It came at last, the rattle, the crash of seven juvenile bone-players in the difficult overture to the opera of Daniel Tucker. It was awful, it ended, and the applause shook the old tenement to its foundation. Of Mitchell himself I can recollect little more than that he was a jovial, easy sort of fellow personally, and that he was, as his scenic biographer would have said, a first-rate Ethiopian artist. Scandal had it that this same biographer who was, it must be remembered, his business manager and partner, did risk the earnings of Mr. Mitchell's minstrels in hazardous backrooms, and thus precipitated a catastrophe which the want of harmony among the members would sooner or later have brought upon the troupe. In the absence of positive knowledge on the subject I would not like to say how true or false this rumour was. This much only I will vouch for. We were advertised to perform in some city of southern Ohio, and going down to the depot with our big and little boxes, green bays, bags and fiddle cases, we were startled with the announcement that there was no money in the treasury to pay our way out of Cincinnati. I remember that the veteran German violinist scratching his wig, which I need hardly say he had lived to recover, and squeezing his violin under his arm remarked, when he heard this piece of news, well, lendy, gombony is bust! And in point of fact that veteran violinist was right. I was afterward one of the volunteers at the grand complimentary benefit given to Mitchell at Cincinnati, with the proceeds of which he was sent out to California to join his friend's birch and backus. Mitchell, our fellow, like Lynch and Sliter, and so many of my old associates in the cork opera, has passed away, let us hope to a quieter stage, beyond the double-dealing of managers and the contumely of publicans. An old showman is, in truth, a being sui generis. You rarely meet one who will not tell you he has been twenty-two years in the show business. He always talks in hyperbole, uses adjectives for adverbs, and arranges all the minor incidents of his life as well as his conversation in the most dramatic forms. He is often a better friend to others than to himself. He is not naturally worse than the majority of men, but has more temptation. A good Negro minstrel would, in any other profession, be an admirable chryton in respect to morals. While acknowledging with pride that I met in this calling some who deserved even such praise, it is due to the truth to state also that I have known many and many a poor fellow who was, in the language of Addison, reduced, like Hannibal, to seek relief from court to court, and wander up and down a vagabond in Africa. CHAPTER VII The day after the farewell benefit of Mitchell I was engaged by Dr. Spalding, the veteran manager, whose old quarrel with Dan Rice has made him famous to the lovers of the circus. He was then fitting out the floating palace for its voyage on the western and southern rivers. The floating palace was a great boat built expressly for show purposes. It was towed from place to place by a steamer called the James Raymond. The palace contained a museum with all the usual concomitance of invisible ladies, stuffed giraffes, puppet dancing, et cetera, et cetera. The Raymond contained, besides the dining-hall and state rooms of the employees, a concert saloon fitted up with great elegance and convenience and called the Redotto. In this latter I was engaged, in conjunction with a full band of minstrels, to do my jig and wench dances. The two boats left Cincinnati with nearly a hundred souls on board, that being the necessary complement of the vast establishment, we were bound for Pittsburgh, where we were to give our first exhibition, proposing to stop afterward, on our way down, at all the towns and landings along the Ohio. Everything went well on our way up the river, till we came, within about twenty miles of Wheeling Virginia, when the Raymond stuck fast on a sandbar. It was thought best for the people to be transferred to the palace, so as to lighten the steamer and let her work off. When, accordingly, we had all huddled into the museum, our lines were cast off and our anchor let go. But we were carried half a mile downstream before the anchor went. Here, all day, from the decks of the palace, we could watch the futile efforts of the Raymond to get off the bar. The only provision for the inner man on board of our craft was a drinking saloon, which was of very little comfort to the numerous ladies of the party, to say the least. Toward night we became exceedingly hungry, but no relief was sent us from the steamer. Ben Risse, an obese bass-singer, who was a terrible gourmand, and who had been for the last five hours raving about the decks in a pitiable manner, rushed suddenly out upon the guard about eight o'clock, declaring that he saw a boatload of provisions coming from the Raymond. A shout of joy now went up from the famished people that shook the stuffed giraffes and wax-works in their glass cases. It was a boat, indeed, but it contained simply the captain, mate, and pilot, who had come all that way after their evening bitters at the drinking saloon. They expressed themselves very sorry for us, and were confident that they could now get the steamer off the bar. This liquid stimulus was all that had been needed from the first. With this mild assurance, for a foundation to our hopes of relief, they took their departure, and we waited on and on through the long night. Risse, the bass-singer, never slept a wink, or allowed many others to sleep. His hungry voice, like a loon's on some solitary lake, breaking in upon the stillness where and when it was least expected. Wrapped in the veritable cloak of the great Pacha, Mohammed Ali, I drowsed through the latter part of the night, crouched down between the glass departments of the waxen Tamashanta and the twelve apostles. In the morning there were several more steamers aground in the neighbourhood, but no better prospect of the raiments getting clear. We were finally taken off to her in small boats and allowed to break our long fast. Instead of rising, the river fell, and we were left almost a week on dry land. Our provisions, giving out, it was thought best for the performers to be taken up to wheeling by a little stern-wheeler that happened to come along. At that city we gave several exhibitions in Washington Hall, proceeding thence down the river on the stern-wheeler to play at the towns along till we should be overtaken by the palace and the Raymond. We passed those unfortunate boats, still laboring to free themselves, and were greeted with hearty cheers by the people on board. One night the river rose suddenly, and in a day or so we were overtaken by the whole establishment at Marietta, Ohio. The proposed trip to Pittsburgh was abandoned. We commenced our voyage down the river, exhibiting in the afternoon and evening and sometimes in the morning, at two and often three towns or landings in a day. It needed not this excess of its labours to tire me of the showman's life. Several months before I had begun to doubt whether a great Negro minstrel was a more enviable man than a great senator or author. As these doubts grew on me I purchased some school books and betook myself to study every day, devouring, in the intervals of arithmetic and grammar, the contents of every work of biography and poetry that I could lay hands on. The novelty and excitement of this odd life indeed were wearing away. All audiences at last looked alike to me, as all lecture-goers do to Dr. Holmes. They laughed at the same places in the performance, applauded at the same place, and looked inane or interested at the same place, day after day, week after week, and month after month. I became gradually indifferent to their applause, or only noticed when it failed at the usual step or pantomime, then succeeded a sort of contempt for audiences, and at last a positive hatred of them and myself. I noticed, or thought I noticed, that their faces wore the same vacant expression whether their eyes were staring at me, or the stuffed giraffes, or the dancing puppets of the museum. Nevertheless the days and nights, too, on the palace were eventful ones. Some unexpected thing was always happening to the boats, or to the performers, or to the audiences. An occasional struggle with the town authorities would add spice to our life. What made these squabbles particularly interesting was that they never resulted twice alike. The one that caused us the most merriment and, consequently, dwells best in my memory, occurred on the Ohio at West Columbia, Virginia. Certain authorities at that ambitious little town had agreed with our agent that our license should be the sum of two dollars and fifty cents, which was merely reasonable in those days, so innocent of our later improvements in taxation, but when we had opened our doors to the vast multitude on the banks, certain others of the authorities became suddenly impressed with the idea that the agreement with the agent was based on too cheap a plan, and demanded twenty-five dollars, or the shows could not go on. Our managers strenuously refused, but offered at last to compromise rather than have any further trouble, tendering twelve dollars and a half. The authorities persisted in their unreasonable demand, and said, with still greater flourish of constables, etc., that the shows should not go on. It was the work of about ten minutes to cast off the lines and float downstream a few rods just outside the limits of the corporation, and the shows did go on, without paying any license at all, and to overflowing and sympathizing audiences. Shortly after, at another little town in Kentucky, a runaway couple came into the museum, bringing the squire with them, and right in front of the glass case were a stuffed hyena and a hilarious alligator, also stuffed, exchanged perpetual smiles at each other, which of course were intended by the taxidermist as looks of ferocity, and while a barrel organ was playing a lively dance for the puppets, this runaway young couple was married. A brother or the lady arrived on a scene just too late to prevent the nuptials. The only means of revenge he could think of was to get abominably drunk and raise a disturbance in the concert room that afternoon. It must have been a memorable day with that particular family, for the young gentleman was roundly whipped for his share in the wedding ceremonies. The row, however, became general. That was the momentous occasion when Governor Doar, entering the arena by a side door, announced with some emphasis that he wanted it understood he had something to say in that fight. He was standing on a seat by the door when he commenced this speech. It was never ended, at least, to his satisfaction. He had just begun his exhortium as reported when some stalwart Kentuckian knocked him clear through the door. With remarkable presence of mind the Governor picked up his hat, as if he had merely happened to drop it on the guard of the boat, and walked quietly off to his state-room, leaving the regular ushers to restore order. If I had not before mentioned Doar's presence on the palace, it has been because I have been trying to explain in my puzzled memory how he came there, and what was the line of his duties. I should have put him down at once, as the literary gentleman of the establishment were it not for the fact that we had another who manifestly filled that office. I allude to the gentleman who edited the daily paper which was printed in the museum and distributed gratuitously to its patrons. This man was the founder, and for a long time the editor of one of the best known and most influential journals now published in the Union. The wreck of a fine scholar and a graphic writer, who had been the associate of some of the highest and best of our land, it was a melancholy sight to see him industriously printing his little paper before the stolid curious people who thronged about his stand. At the same stand gingerbread and brilliant colored candies and lemonade were dispensed, pale red lemonade which seemed, as one might say, continually beholding its maker, and only half succeeding in its attempt to blush. Poor old fellow, the labour of his hands and brain was, as I have remarked, distributed gratuitously. The lemonade was sold for five cents a glass. This thought, if it ever occurred to him, could have had little force, for his philosophy taught him to accept every situation unmermeringly. He had but one argument to establish his theory of fate, and he was never weary of repeating it, when any passing philanthropist would grapple with him and endeavour to show him that he ought to be very miserable, he would tell this story. There was a man, he would say, at work on a scaffold of a four-story building in Cincinnati. The scaffolding gave way, and he fell those four stories, and one besides, down into the cellar. Fifteen minutes thereafter he was, up again, uninjured at his work. A week afterward he was walking in front of Alph Burnett's saloon, stepped on a watermelon rind, fell, broke his neck, and died instantly. The narrator would never vouchsave any explanation. When his hearer, making an application for himself, would accuse our philosopher of fatalism, he would only smile good-naturedly and go about his duties. It must indeed have been a dull penetration that could see nothing better in the old fellow's story, especially under the every-day commentary of his uncomplaining life, and I am glad to say others put this larger interpretation upon him and his philosophy, that his own misfortunes had taught him more than his story, the ways of God are inscrutable, and that he is all in all and that high or low, successful or broken, we are all alike in his merciful hands. Scarcely three years ago I saw my old friend for the last time. We met in the street at San Francisco where he then lived, and where he has since died. How well he was known and loved there was in some measure attested by the honourable manner of his burial. There are few printers, at least in the Metropolis of the Pacific, who will not remember him, although they may have known nothing more of his personal history than that he was the veteran attaché of Calhoun's Job Rooms. Whatever the straits to which his peculiar misfortune brought him, he never lost that indescribable dignity and courtesy which were a part of his heritage as a born gentleman. Poor old John McCreary, he would have written a better obituary of me than this, and published it in his palace journal, if I had chance to get knocked on the head in some of the riots and perilous fights which we witnessed together at those lawless backwoods landings. And this brings me back again to Governor Dore, who was sore in the face, and more especially in the feelings for some time after his disastrous attempt to reason with the excited spirits of that Kentucky audience. He could not bear with any degree of equanimity the slightest illusion to the day of the marriage in the museum. I cannot remember exactly when the Governor left the palace or why, as he was, I have already intimated, ever one of the company. I leaned to the opinion that the manager, or his right-hand man, the once famous Van Orden of Dan Rice's satirical song, kept him on board to be amused by his conversation. Except this amusing conversation and a commendable regularity at meals, I can think of no activity whatever on the part of the Governor while with us, save only that he did two things. The first was to get knocked through the door of the concert room, as before mentioned, and the second was to write up for our daily newspaper, the palace journal, a most brilliant account of the curiosities in the museum. The picturesque joy with which, in that series of articles, he would pursue the history of some bogus war-club through the hands and over the heads of whole dynasties of savage kings, the sunny sea voyages upon which he would send his adventurous rhetoric to far-tropic islands after some insignificant shell, which, perhaps, was in reality captured in the neighborhood of Long Branch, the fearful and bloody deeds of midnight assassins that he would group about some old rusty sheaf-knife, which was curious only because it had been rusted to order by chemicals, and then the melting tenderness in which his soul would go out in the heart history of our wax figures, especially of that stolid, blue-eyed lady in excessive black lashes and pink cheeks, who had been bought with an odd lot from an old collection at Albany, and attired in cheap gauze and labelled the Empress Josephine. These delightful arabesques of invention and sentiment, and, in a word, any of the Governor's fine literary pyrotechnics, may not be reproduced. They have gone down, under the last files of the Palace Journal, who shall say, in what Western lethy. And yet I have the bad taste to own that, for my own reading, I would rather come across that series of descriptive articles now than upon the lost books of Livy. The Governor fairly reveled in his work. Indeed my last memory of him is, as I saw him, with his lead pencil in his hand, and indefinite fool-scat before him, sprawled out upon his stomach on the floor of the museum, one forenoon when there was no exhibition. He was staring, in a fine frenzy, straight into the distended mouth and merry glass eyes of our stuffed alligator. In the act, no doubt, was the ecstatic Governor of inventing and composing details of the heart-rending tragedy of the last man swallowed by the smiling, convivial Saurian before him. And there I shall leave him.