After his liking for Shakespeare and Dickens he liked the Ingoldsby Legends, but he did not care for the poetry which I was constantly reading and trying to write. The effect of my endeavor as it appeared in the passionate or pessimistic verse which I contributed to Eastern periodicals must have amused him; but perhaps he tolerated me because, along with this poetical effusiveness in which I was grievously sensitive to any breath of sarcasm, I had a tooth as sharp as his own in our journalism. He was intelligently and I suppose scientifically fond of music, since he failed of no chance to hear the best, a chance rare in our city; and he held that the composition of grand opera was the highest feat of the human intellect, which was to me a stumbling-block and foolishness, though I liked dramatic singing, and indeed singing of all kinds. We came together in our fondness for the theater, and after our evening's work was done he sometimes turned with me into the barnlike structure on State Street which served the pathetic need of the drama in Columbus at that day. The place was heated in the winter for its twenty or thirty frequenters by two huge cast-iron stoves, one on either side of the orchestra: stoves such as I have since seen in English cathedrals; but when the curtain rose the blast of freezing air that swept out upon us made us shiver for the players in their bare arms and necks and their thin hosiery and drapery. They were often such bad players that they merited their sufferings; the prompter audibly bore a very leading part in the performance as he still does in the Italian theater; yet for all his efforts we one night saw Hamlet in two acts; it was, to be sure, a very cold night, of an air eagerer and nippinger than even that the ghost walked in at Elsinore, and we would not have had the play longer. Yet we often saw very well given some of the old English comedies which are now no longer well or ill given; and between the acts, somewhere, a plain young girl, in a modest modicum of stocking, represented the ballet by dancing the Highland Fling, always the Highland Fling. Such plays as "The Lady of Lyons" happened now and then, and "The Daughter of the Regiment" must have been, at least partly, sung. We did not lack the more darkling melodrama, and there were heroic pieces which gave the leading actor opportunities not lost upon him, however they failed of effect with the rest of the cast. I remember how one night a robustuous periwig-pated fellow ramped and roared up and down the stage, but left quite cold a large group of the _dramatis personæ_ which his magniloquence was intended to convulse with either sympathy or antipathy; and how Reed noted with mock-thoughtful recognition of the situation, "Can't excite those fellows off to the left, any." I should not be able to say how killingly droll I found this. VII