e visions of the poet,
making Hamlet's sorrows as vital as our own.

From this performance, which filled me with vague ambitions and a
glorious melancholy, I returned to my association with a tinker, a
tailor, and a tinner, whose careless and stupid comments on the play
both pained and angered me. I went to my work next day in such absorbed
silence as only love is supposed to give.

I re-read my _Hamlet_ now with the light of Booth's face in my eyes and
the music of his glorious voice in my ear. As I nailed and sawed at pine
lumber, I murmured inaudibly the lofty lines of the play, in the hope of
fixing forever in my mind the cadences of the great tragedian's
matchless voice.

Great days! Growing days! Lonely days! Days of dream and development,
needing only the girl to be perfect--but I had no one but Alice to whom
I could voice my new enthusiasm and she was not only out of the reach of
my voice, but serenely indifferent to my rhapsodic letters concerning
_Hamlet_ and the genius of Edwin Booth.

CHAPTER XXII

We Discover New England

Edwin Booth's performance of _Hamlet_ had another effect. It brought to
my mind the many stories of Boston which my father had so often related
to his children. I recalled his enthusiastic accounts of the elder Booth
and Edwin Forrest, and especially his descriptions of the wonderful
scenic effects in _Old Put_ and _The Gold Seekers_, wherein actors rode
down mimic stone steps or debarked from theatrical ships which sailed
into pictured wharves, and one day in the midst of my lathing and
sawing, I evolved a daring plan--I decided to visit Boston and explore
New England.

With all his feeling for the East my father had never revisited it. This
was a matter of pride with him. "I never take the back trail," he said,
and yet at times, as he dwelt on the old home in the state of Maine a
wistful note had crept into his voice, and so now in writing to him, I
told him that I intended to seek out his boyhood haunts in order that I
might tell him all about the friends and relations who still lived
there.

Without in any formal way intending it the old borderman had endowed
both his sons with a large sense of the power and historic significance
of Massachusetts. He had contrived to make us feel some part of his
idolatry of Wendell Phillips, for his memory of the great days of _The
Liberator_ were keen and worshipful. From him I derived a belief that
there were giants in those days