In mingling, therefore, among mountebanks and buffoons I was protected
by the very vivacity of imagination which had led me among them. I
moved about enveloped, as it were, in a protecting delusion, which my
fancy spread around me. I assimilated to these people only as they
struck me poetically; their whimsical ways and a certain
picturesqueness in their mode of life entertained me; but I was neither
amused nor corrupted by their vices. In short, I mingled among them, as
Prince Hal did among his graceless associates, merely to gratify my
humor.

I did not investigate my motives in this manner, at the time, for I was
too careless and thoughtless to reason about the matter; but I do so
now, when I look back with trembling to think of the ordeal to which I
unthinkingly exposed myself, and the manner in which I passed through
it. Nothing, I am convinced, but the poetical temperament, that hurried
me into the scrape, brought me out of it without my becoming an arrant
vagabond.

Full of the enjoyment of the moment, giddy with the wildness of animal
spirits, so rapturous in a boy, I capered, I danced, I played a
thousand fantastic tricks about the stage, in the villages in which we
exhibited; and I was universally pronounced the most agreeable monster
that had ever been seen in those parts. My disappearance from school
had awakened my father's anxiety; for I one day heard a description of
myself cried before the very booth in which I was exhibiting; with the
offer of a reward for any intelligence of me. I had no great scruple
about letting my father suffer a little uneasiness on my account; it
would punish him for past indifference, and would make him value me the
more when he found me again. I have wondered that some of my comrades
did not recognize in me the stray sheep that was cried; but they were