From pit and boxes there was now a universal call for the Story-
Teller.

That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him. As I
left the stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given
me a letter with the postmark of my native village, and directed to
my assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion.
Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown of the Story-Teller, and
conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary could be no
other than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read it,
affected me most painfully. I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of
my guardian standing among the fripperies of the theatre and
pointing to the players,--the fantastic and effeminate men, the
painted women, the giddy girl in boy's clothes, merrier than
modest,--pointing to these with solemn ridicule, and eying me with
stern rebuke. His image was a type of the austere duty, and they of
the vanities of life.

I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my
hand, while the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the
theatre. Another train of thought came over me. The stern old man
appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sorrow, softening his
authority with love as a father might, and even bending his
venerable head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in his
own mistaken discipline. I strode twice across the chamber, then
held the letter in the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume
unread. It is fixed in my mind, and was so at the time, that he had
addressed me in a style of paternal wisdom, and love, and
reconciliation which I could not have resisted had I but risked the
trial. The thought still haunts me that then I made my irrevocable