Three or four bad dramatisations of the story had already been acted,
but without marked success, Yates of London had given one in which the
hero dies, one had been acted by my father, one by Hackett, and
another by Burke. Some of these versions I had remembered when I was
a boy, and I should say that Burke's play and performance were the
best, but nothing that I remembered gave me the slightest
encouragement that I could get a good play out of any of the existing
materials. Still I was so bent upon acting the part that I started
for the city, and in less than a week, by industriously ransacking the
theatrical wardrobe establishments for old leather and mildewed cloth
and by personally superintending the making of the wigs, each article
of my costume was completed; and all this, too, before I had written a
line of the play or studied a word of the part.

This is working in an opposite direction from all the conventional
methods in the study and elaboration of a dramatic character, and
certainly not following the course I would advise any one to pursue.
I merely mention the out-of-the-way, upside-down manner of going to
work as an illustration of the impatience and enthusiasm with which I
entered upon the task, I can only account for my getting the dress
ready before I studied the part to the vain desire I had of witnessing
myself in the glass, decked out and equipped as the hero of the
Catskills.

I got together the three old printed versions of the drama and the
story itself. The plays were all in two acts. I thought it would be
an improvement in the drama to arrange it in three, making the scene
with the spectre crew an act by itself. This would separate the
poetical from the domestic side of the story. But by far the most