a negro boy entered the room bearing a small osier
basket neatly covered with a snowy napkin. It had the general appearance
of a basket of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as such it
figured for a moment in Mr. Booth's conjecture. On lifting the cloth the
actor started from the chair with a genuine expression on his features
of that terror which he was used so marvelously to simulate as Richard
III. in the midnight tent-scene or as Macbeth when the ghost of Banquo
usurped his seat at table.

In the pretty willow-woven basket lay the head of Booth's old pensioner,
which head the old pensioner had bequeathed in due legal form to the
tragedian, begging him henceforth to adopt it as one of the necessary
stage properties in the fifth act of Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy of
"Hamlet." "Take it away, you black imp!" thundered the actor to the
equally aghast negro boy, whose curiosity had happily not prompted him
to investigate the dark nature of his burden.

Shortly afterward, however, the horse-stealer's residuary legatee,
recovering from the first shock of his surprise, fell into the grim
humor of the situation, and proceeded to carry out to the letter the
testator's whimsical request. Thus it was that the skull came to secure
an engagement to play the role of poor Yorick in J. B. Booth's company
of strolling players, and to continue a while longer to glimmer behind
the footlights in the hands of his famous son.

Observing that the grave-digger in his too eager realism was damaging
the thing--the marks of his pick and spade are visible on the
cranium--Edwin Booth presently replaced it with a papier-mache
counterfeit manufactured in the property-room of the theatre. During
his subsequent wanderings in Australia and California, he carefully
preserved the relic, which finally found repose on the bracket in
question.

How often have I sat, of an afternoon, in that front room on the fourth
floor of the clubhouse in Gramercy Park, watching the winter or summer
twilight gradually softening and blurring the sharp outline of the skull
until it vanished uncannily into the gloom! Edwin Booth had forgotten,
if ever he knew, the name of the man; but I had no need of it in order
to establish acquaintance with poor Yorick. In this association I was
conscious of a deep tinge of sentiment on my own part, a circumstance
not without its queerness, considering how very distant the acquaintance
really was.

Possibly he was a fellow o