were not of it, and we seldom visited it. When we did, it was to go to
a matinee at some theatre, returning the same afternoon in time for
supper. My grandfather was very fond of the drama, and had been
acquainted since he was a young man with some of the most
distinguished actors. With him I saw Edwin Booth in "Macbeth," and
Lester Wallack in "Rosedale," and John McCullough in "Virginius," a
tragedy which was to me so real and moving that I wept all the way
home in the train. Sometimes I was allowed to visit the theatre alone,
and on these afternoons I selected performances of a lighter variety,
such as that given by Harrigan & Hart in their theatre on Broadway.
Every Thanksgiving Day I was allowed, after witnessing the annual
football match between the students from Princeton and Yale
universities, to remain in town all that night. On these great
occasions I used to visit Koster & Bial's on Twenty-third Street, a
long, low building, very dark and very smoky, and which on those
nights was blocked with excited mobs of students, wearing different
colored ribbons and shouting the cries of their different colleges. I
envied and admired these young gentlemen, and thought them very fine
fellows indeed. They wore in those days long green coats, which made
them look like coachmen, and high, bell-shaped hats, both of which, as
I now can see, were a queer survival of the fashions of 1830, and
which now for the second time have disappeared.

To me, with my country clothes and manners and scanty spending money,
the way these young collegians wagered their money at the football
match and drank from their silver flasks, and smoked and swaggered in
the hotel corridors, was something to be admired and copied. And
although I knew none of them, and would have been ashamed had they
seen me in company with any of my boy friends from Dobbs Ferry, I
followed them from one hotel to another, pretending I was with them,