pictures of
the green and pleasant farm lands, of social farmers at barn-raisings,
and of tables filled with fatness. I am walking again in my stocking
feet, high on the "purline plate," beetle in hand, driving home the
oaken "pins." I am shingling on the broad roof of a suburban house from
which I can see the sunny slopes of a meadow and sheep feeding therein.
I am mending a screen door for a farmer's wife while she confides to me
the tragedy of her life--and always I have the foolish boyish notion
that I am out in the world and seeing life.

Into the midst of this busy peaceful season of manual labor came my
first deeply romantic admiration. Edwin Booth was announced as "the
opening attraction of the New Opera House" and I fairly trembled with
anticipatory delight, for to me the word _Booth_ meant all that was
splendid and tragic and glorious in the drama. I was afraid that
something might prevent me from hearing him.

At last the night came and so great was the throng, so strong the
pressure on the doors that the lock gave way and I, with my dollar
clutched tightly in my hand, was borne into the hall and half-way up the
stairs without touching foot to the floor, and when at last, safe in my
balcony seat I waited for the curtain to rise, I had a distinct
realization that a shining milestone was about to be established in my
youthful trail.

My father had told me of the elder Booth, and of Edwin's beautiful
Prince of Denmark I had heard many stories, therefore I waited with awe
as well as eagerness, and when the curtain, rising upon the court scene,
discovered the pale, handsome face and graceful form of the noble Dane,
and the sound of his voice,--that magic velvet voice--floated to my ear
with the words, "Seems, madame, I know not seems," neither time nor
space nor matter existed for me--I was in an ecstasy of attention.

I had read much of Shakespeare. I could recite many pages of the
tragedies and historical plays, and I had been assured by my teachers
that _Hamlet_ was the greatest of all dramas, but Edwin Booth in one
hour taught me more of its wonders, more of the beauty of the English
language than all my instructors and all my books. He did more, he
aroused in me a secret ambition to read as he read, to make the dead
lines of print glow with color and throb with music. There was something
magical in his interpretation of the drama's printed page. With voice
and face and hand he restored for duller minds th