Thus, it will be seen, he went away from the theatre with his night’s rest already half complete, and was able to arise at four or five the next morning and deliver to any chance comer throughout the day a reliable opinion on the best points made the evening previous by Jamison or Murdoch--the actors of those times--in the great scene wherein Macduff “lays on”; or this young gentleman could tell you, perhaps, the number of times the blades struck fire in the mighty broadsword battle, sustained single-handed against fearful odds, by Mrs. Wilkinson in the “French Spy.” In the course of time our company started on its travels through the neighboring States, and when we returned to Cincinnati, my young friend and fellow-wrestler was gone; moved away with his parents from the hotel, I was told, and to another city. Now what has made this reminiscence especially interesting, at least to me, was my next meeting with the subject of it, years and years afterward; because that was one of the strange occurrences which are, after all, about as frequent in an adventurous life as they are in fiction. At a little inn in the shadow of the Odenwald, not far from the Rhine, I had the pleasure of taking him the next time by the hand. We have since passed many a day together on the Iser and Seine and Tiber, and we have slept many a night in the most uninviting of _auberges_ and _Gasthäuser_; and not there, I am proud to say or in his hospitable mansion on Michigan Avenue, or, late at night, in the office of the great newspaper which he helps to edit, have I ever, in his generous manhood, discovered any sleeping on his post, or sleeplessness off from it. There were in “The Mitchells” more discordant elements than I recollect to have known in any other troupe in the fortunes of which I ever had a part. I think there were too many leading comedians and musical stars among us for anything so sober and dull as a good understanding to exist at all times. Some one, you know, must play second parts and second violin; and that necessity was a smothered volcano in our midst. Stale jokes, unuttered, sit heavily on your comedian’s memory; they must be refreshed or renewed by the laughter of an audience; and eclipsed musical brilliancy, when turned in upon itself, illumines a very disagreeable void, and generally results in heart-burnings. I have a lingering impression that I myself, in this company, sighed regretfully for my old place as tambourinist and end-man. There were three other tambourinists and end-men who, like myself, had been professionally cut short in a comic career, to make way for a person whose jokes, in our opinion, were not half so good as ours, and for whose acrobatics with the complicated tambourine itself we were united, as three men and one boy, in our sublime contempt.