did not ask him where he was going, or where
he had been; but the curfew in Hubert Street tolled at ten. The Boy
calculated carefully and exactly how many minutes it took him to run to
Hubert Street from Brougham's or from Burton's; and by the middle of the
second act his watch--a small silver affair with a hunting-case, in
which he could not keep an uncracked crystal--was always in his hand. He
never disobeyed his father, and for years he never knew what became of
Claude Melnotte after he went to the wars; or if Damon got back in time
to save Pythias before the curtain fell. The Boy, naturally, had a most
meagre notion as to what all these plays were about, but he enjoyed his
fragments of them as he rarely enjoys plays now. Sometimes, in these
days, when the air is bad, and plays are worse, and big hats are worse
than either, he wishes that he were forced to leave the modern
play-house at nine-forty-five, on pain of no supper that night, or
twenty lines of "Virgil" the next day.

[Illustration: THE BOY AS VIRGINIUS]

On very stormy afternoons the boys played theatre in the large garret of
The Boy's Hubert Street house; a convenient closet, with a door and a
window, serving for the Castle of Elsinore in "Hamlet," for the gunroom
of the ship in "Black-eyed Susan," or for the studio of Phidias in "The
Marble Heart," as the case might be. "The Brazilian Ape," as requiring
more action than words, was a favorite entertainment, only they all
wanted to play Jocko the Ape; and they would have made no little success
out of the "Lady of Lyons" if any of them had been willing to play
Pauline. Their costumes and properties were slight and not always
accurate, but they could "launch the curse of Rome," and describe "two
hearts beating as one," in a manner rarely equalled on the regular
stage. The only thing they really lacked was an audience, neither Lizzie
Gustin nor Ann Hughes ever being able to sit through more than one act
at a time. When The Boy, as Virginius, with his uncle Aleck's
sword-cane, stabbed all the feathers out of the pillow which represented
the martyred Virginia; and when Joe Stuart, as Falstaff, broke the
bottom out of Ann Hughes's clothes-basket, the license was revoked, and
the season came to an untimely end.

Until the beginning of the weekly, or the fortnightly, sailings of the
Collins line of steamers from the foot of Canal Street (a spectacle
which they never missed in any weather), Joe Stuart, Johnny R