The table was decorated with glass flagons and goblets, rose, ruby, pale and dark green, some covered with gold arabesques, triumphs of the Sandwich Glass Factory. With dessert came the thin pink finger bowls; the children dipped their fingers and rubbed them round and round the rims, producing a faint elfin music I never hear without a vision of the Ashburton Place dining room, my tall dignified uncle, his little silver-haired mate, and Eliza, the beauty of the family. A few years ago, motoring from Newport to Buzzard’s Bay, the way led through a fine old town, full of colonial houses and wide streets lined by magnificent elms. “What’s this place?” I asked. “East Sandwich”, the name blew back from the lips of our host, who drove the machine. Soon we passed a huge brick factory, with broken windows, smokeless chimneys, deserted, forlorn, yet with something that spoke of past greatness. “Uncle Hpesoj’s glass factory!” Whirling along the sand dunes, I have no eyes for the scenery; I see the old factory alive again, with smoking chimneys, glowing forges, swarms of swarthy Bohemians. A dark-eyed hairy man dips a blowpipe in a molten mass, twirls it quickly in both hands till a sort of blob forms at the end, puts the tube to his mouth and blows a rainbow bubble, to show a group of wondering children how Bohemian glass is made. Uncle Hpesoj was a stockholder in the Boston Theater and often allowed our family the privilege of using his excellent seats. Mama, who as a child had been forbidden the theater, took great pains that we should see the best plays and best acting of our time. Wednesday and Saturday matineés at the Boston are among the most vivid memories of these years. The splendors of the great theater were still undimmed. The drop curtain, representing the Lake of Lugano, gave me so high an idea of Italian scenery that when I saw the real Lake of Lugano I was, somehow, disappointed. My first play was “Jocko, the Brazilian”, a pantomime, acted by the Ravels. Jocko, the hero, a wise brown ape, saves the heroine from drowning, only to be rewarded by a careless bullet that ends his life. When dear brown Jocko fell mortally wounded to the ground, his life blood--a bunch of scarlet cotton wool--ebbing from his side, I fell into such a paroxysm of weeping that I still remember the pain of it, when some real sorrows are forgotten. My first opera was “Norma”; all I remember is my amazement when the stout Italian prima donna, over whose death I had shed such bitter tears, came before the curtain at the end of the performance to receive her share of the applause. I have had many such shocks since and have still to be convinced that anything so inartistic is pardonable. My first tragedy was “The Iron Chest”, with Edwin Booth in the part of Edward Mortimer. I have seen most of the great actors of my time, and I have never seen one who equaled Booth, in tragedy, comedy, or melodrama. “I do remember an apothecary--and hereabouts he dwells!”