took it for granted that I was one, and that their roar of welcome
was but a feeble echo of those which had thundered around me in
lofty theatres. Such an enthusiastic uproar was never heard. Each
person seemed a Briarcus clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping
his feet and several cudgels in play with stamping and thumping on
the floor; while the ladies flourished their white cambric
handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow and red bandanna, like the
flags of different nations. After such a salutation, the celebrated
Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce so humble an affair as
Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe.

This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and
afforded good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to
my shame, did I spare. I never knew the "magic of a name" till I
used that of Mr. Higginbotham. Often as I repeated it, there were
louder bursts of merriment than those which responded to what, in my
opinion, were more legitimate strokes of humor. The success of the
piece was incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair, which
Little Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had
fastened to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the
queerest gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine. The
audience, supposing that some enormous joke was appended to this
long tail behind, were ineffably delighted, and gave way to such a
tumult of approbation that, just as the story closed, the benches
broke beneath them and left one whole row of my admirers on the
floor. Even in that predicament they continued their applause. In
after times, when I had grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene
for an example how much of fame is humbug; how much the meed of what
our better nature blushes at; how much an accident; how much
bestowed on mistaken principles; and how small and poor the remnant.