With Mr. Kneeland, the violinist and musical director of the “Booker Troupe,” I travelled subsequently in two other companies. As I shall have no occasion to mention him again, I will say here that he was a quiet, modest sort of fellow, who had a remarkable talent for sleeping. That man could sleep at any time and in any place. If he happened to be forgotten in the hurry of changing conveyances,--which was not infrequently the case,--he was sure to be left snoring in some waiting-room, or crouched down among the cushions in some railway coach, with his violin-box for a pillow. He alone always played for my jigs and hornpipes; and as I used to get a side view of him on the stage, with his eyes shut and his heel beating the measure of the ecstasy which at such moments travelled, for instance, “The rocky road to Dublin,” away up into the cirrus heaven of the octaves, I was more than once impressed with the annoying belief that he was asleep, or soon would be, and that I should have to complete my grand _finale_ of wings and shuffles to the uncertain fugue of his snoring. Whether he ever did fall asleep or not on the stage I cannot tell for sure; but, asleep or awake, he always managed to keep better time than I did. He practised De Bériot’s “Seventh Air” for six months almost constantly in his room, never to my knowledge venturing to play it in public. Now his room was generally the next one to mine, and I have often wished, after three or four steady hours of De Bériot, that Mr. Kneeland would fall asleep; yet by a strange fatality he never did, unless there was some likelihood of his being left behind. Nevertheless, Kneeland was, by all odds, the best-natured and the most substantial man of the “Booker Troupe.” He is now, I hear, the thrifty and honest possessor of a goodly farm in Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife and children. Of late years, it is only when the crops are poor or the monotony of rural pursuits leaves him open to the temptation, that he abandons his plough, like another sturdy Cincinnatus, to give his services to the public. Then for a brief summer he will, it is said, sally forth to lead the brass and string band of some circus or menagerie to the conquest of bucolic or urban ears, and fractional currency. After a whole season of ovations, in which captive elephants and camels and lions, or superb band-wagons and “grand entries” and bare-back equestrians, have moved to the time of his music, the honest Kneeland goes back to his cows and sheep and domestic hearth, and is happy. * * * * * Johnny Booker still lives. I meet him every few years in the most out-of-the-way and unexpected places. He confines himself now, I believe, exclusively to the circus or menagerie business. One or the other branch of this style of tent-life seems, by the way, to be the ultimate refuge of your old showman,--the last stage of his worldly transmigrations.