he boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama
preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty,
her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart,
but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate
who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two
down--click-click, click-click--and died all over the deck of the pirate
ship in the opening piece. This was called the _Beacon of Death_, and
the scene represented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lantern
dangling from the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to their
doom. Afterward the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap of
the dialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the pirate
captain appeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, "Let us go
below and get some brandy!" the boy would have bartered all his hopes
of bliss to have been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked,
and longed to be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play,
and he so glutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years
at the theatre that he afterward came to be very tired of it, and
avoided the plays and novels that had very marked villains in them.

He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night, and he
lived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted, which was
well on to midnight; for in those days the theatre did not meanly put
the public off with one play, but gave it a heartful and its money's
worth with three. On his first night my boy saw _The Beacon of Death_,
_Bombastes Furioso_, and _Black-Eyed Susan_, and he never afterward saw
less than three plays each night, and he never missed a night, as long
as the theatre languished in the unfriendly air of that mainly
Calvinistic community, where the theatre was regarded by most good
people as the eighth of the seven deadly sins. The whole day long he
dwelt in a dream of it that blotted out, or rather consumed with more
effulgent brightness, all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before,
and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like those
villains on the stage, to have a mustache--a black mustache--such as
they wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven, and
somehow to end bloodily, murderously, as became a villain.

I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of ten
years; but I do not defend it; I only portray