Ralph Keeler

“ In the course of time—and it seemed a very long time—we arrived at Cleveland, where part of our freight and passengers were landed. No sooner had the steamer touched the wharf than I sprang ashore, as the best means of curing my nausea. By the time I had reached what I take now to have been Superior Street, I was congratulating myself on my sudden restoration to a better understanding with my rebellious stomach; and for the next hour I was at liberty, in the language of an admired poet of our day, to “lean and loaf at my ease,” flattening my nose against shop-windows. ”

“ The ladies of the profession are sometimes given to gossip and backbiting in as great a degree at least as are the gentlemen. Jealousy may be as rife on a Mississippi show-boat as in the antechamber of any court in Europe. I have known a danseuse to furnish boys with clandestine bouquets to throw on the stage when she appeared; not that she cared at all for the praise or blame of the audience, but that she did care to crush a cleverer rival.
In our company on board the Palace and the Raymond we had strange contrasts in human nature. ”

“ There is such pleasure and pride in the consciousness that one can go where and when one will, without waiting on coaches or trains. Thirty, forty, or fifty good miles left behind in one day, by the means of locomotion nature has given to every one, are not only a consolation to sleep upon at a village inn, but make the sleep sounder and sweeter. I defy any man not to be proud of his strength, when he finds—as almost every one will, after a little practice—that he can make thirty miles on foot, day after day, with perfect ease. ”

“ Accordingly, when we had arrived at Buffalo, I watched my opportunities, and, seizing the right moment, fled precipitately up the docks, unobserved by my well-meaning, self-imposed guardian.
Two hours subsequently, deeming myself safe, I walked boldly on board of the old steamer Baltic. Here, by a wonderful freak of fortune, it was not ten minutes till I had “shipped” as cabin-boy, at the marvellous salary of ten dollars a month. Surely, I have never felt so rich or independent since. ”

“ As they grew dimmer and grayer in the waning light, the rents and seams of centuries disappeared, and the palace of the old Electors used to stand before me in its ancient pride.
It may not be generally known that the day-laborer of America has better food and more of it than many a wealthy burgher of Central Europe. Only the very few, in Germany, can indulge in beefsteaks for breakfast. I soon learned to conform myself to the cup of coffee and piece of dry bread of the German’s morning repast. ”

“ If you have, you will understand the feeling with which, after listening long and steadily to the low rumble of the eddying water, I have received the impression more than once on that old bridge, that I heard the same fatal gurgling sound in the river beneath; and you will understand the feeling, also, I think, with which, at such times, I cast a hasty glance at the Morgue, not far distant, and hurried on to the more cheerful neighborhood of the garden of the Tuileries.
I would not have you believe that the idea of suicide ever crossed my mind. ”

“ Sometimes I spent my evenings at the café, where I always took my breakfast, and where for three soldi,—three cents,—invested in coffee or chocolate, I could sit as long as I liked, reading the papers, or listening to the talk of my artist friends. It was always cheaper for me to go to the opera—taking a very high seat, by the way—than to have a light and a fire in my room. I have seen an opera with a hundred or more people on the stage at a time, in a theatre as large as, and some say larger than, there is in London or Paris, and all it cost me was eight cents. ”

“ No wonder that poor Mike’s blood rushed to his heart, and that he trembled in his boots; the sight would have intimidated stronger and older artists. The trio commenced their overture,—the music, that beautiful air, ‘The Light of Other Days’ (poor fellows! the light of their days had surely faded,—they were blind) , and as they proceeded with their soul-stirring drum and ear-piercing fife, Mike recovered his self-possession. ”

“ The joy of my solitary, Robinson-Crusoe life, on{68} the wharves and among the white-fish barrels, was so strong upon me that I suffered much less than would at first be imagined from the hunger which sometimes filled the long intervals between one meal and the next.
I have just used the words “solitary life,” and I have used them advisedly; for I can remember only one juvenile friend whom I ever picked up as a companion in my vagrancy, and that was an urchin of Irish descent. We met on the wharf, at Detroit, if my memory does not fail me, some days after the events just chronicled. ”

“ The night looked lowering as dark Fate itself, no portents were in the sky, no Corsican Brothers illusions; but something made our hero tremble,—it was the uncertainty of the future. Sustaining himself with a glass of root-beer, he made his way through the obscurity of the gas-light to a dilapidated house, No. 450 Broadway, gave the countersign or word of the night (Daniel Tucker, Esq.) , the door flew open at the magical sound, and Michael entered. At first sight of the interior of that magnificent arena our hero’s cheek slightly paled, and well it might. ”

“ My memories of a steerage passage across the Atlantic are rather vivid than agreeable. Among all my fellow-passengers in that unsavory precinct I found only one philosopher. He was a British officer who took a third-class ticket that he might spend the difference between that and a cabin fare for English porter, which he imbibed from morning to night. He announced as his firm belief, after much observation upon the high cheekbones of our countrymen, that the Americans in a few years would degenerate to Indians,—the natural human types of this continent. ”

“ An old showman is, in truth, a being sui generis. You rarely meet one who will not tell you he has been twenty-two years in the show business. He always talks in hyperbole, uses adjectives for adverbs, and arranges all the minor incidents of his life, as well as his conversation, in the most dramatic forms. He is often a better friend to others than to himself; he is not naturally{172} worse than the majority of men, but has more temptation. A good negro-minstrel would, in any other profession, be an Admirable Crichton in respect to morals. ”

“ It was out of all reason to suppose that a bear would have placed the hat of the inebriate Tam O’Shanter upon the head of the noble Helen Mar; and it was still more out of reason and unnatural to think him guilty of so arranging the waxen “father of his country,” George Washington, that he should be discovered the next morning astride the stuffed alligator, in the exact plight of that famous traveller, Captain Waterman. ”

“ I would not for the world accuse my old instructor of a want of candor, but I must say I think he has confounded me with other and later of his pupils.
It would be as useless as ill-mannered to contradict him, for he has told these stories so often that he believes them implicitly himself. Any unbiassed mind, moreover, will find excuse for the treachery of his memory in the devious and exciting course of his subsequent life, as corypheus of the saw-dusty ring, and especially as the zoologist of the living hippopotamus, and as the moral lecturer upon the manners and customs of the elephant. ”

“ In the very midst of my direst misfortunes, when it seemed that nothing worse could possibly happen to me, the Pacific came steaming back to Detroit. She arrived in the afternoon, and, although I had had nothing to eat that day, I was in too great apprehension of her captain to think of anything but concealment, or escape from the city. ”

“ There were on board ladies who had seen more{210} prosperous days, when they were the chief attractions at the theatres of London, Paris, and New York,—according to their own stories; other ladies who had never associated with such vulgar people before; other ladies who hoped they would die if they did not leave the company at the very next landing, but never left; and yet other ladies, I am rejoiced to add, who were lovely in nature and deed,—kind mothers and faithful wives, whose strength of character and ready cheerfulness tended as far as possible to restore the social equilibrium. ”

“ We assured him that we could not afford to have a servant travel with us. Ephraim rejoined that he did not want any pay; he just wanted to go with the show. We told him it was simply impossible; and Ephraim went away, as we thought, discouraged.
The next morning, as we were getting into the railway-car, whom should we discover there before us but Ephraim, with his baggage under his arm,—a glazed travelling-bag of so attenuated an appearance that it could not possibly have had anything in it but its lining. ”

“ Frau Hirtel was the domestic little body of whom I rented my airy apartment. Fräulein Anna was her rosy daughter, and this little sunbeam in the house was the only child of the family that I had ever seen; though many and many a time, the name of Karl, the only son and brother, was upon their lips. Karl was a Handwerksbursche,—one of those houseless tradesmen, before dwelt upon; and on this Christmas Karl was expected home from his long, long wanderings. ”

“ The “Booker Troupe” wandered all over the Western country, travelling at all hours of night and day and in all manner of conveyances, from the best to the worst. The life was so exciting, and I was so young, that I was probably as happy as an itinerant mortal can be in this world of{132} belated railway-trains, steamboat explosions and collisions, and runaway stage-horses.
In the smaller cities and towns we would sometimes, “by particular request,” end up the evening with a ball. ”

“ The racket that I made at all hours and in all places can be accounted for only by the youthful zeal with which I “practised,” and which I despair of describing in anything so cold as words.
I was then in my twelfth year, and my own master. It was, indeed, in that prosperous winter after the squalid summer of my six months’ wandering. I was going to school at Toledo, Ohio, and leading a very independent life on the money I had made out of the common investment of my five coppers and of my wages, as key-boy of the steamer Northern Indiana, commanded by the late Captain Pheatt. ”

“ I noticed, or thought I noticed,{178} that their faces wore the same vacant expression whether their eyes were staring at me or the stuffed giraffes or the dancing puppets of the museum.
Nevertheless the days, and nights too, on the Palace were eventful ones. Some unexpected thing was always happening to the boats, or to the performers, or to the audiences. An occasional struggle with the town authorities would add spice to our life. ”

“ The man who dusted down Tam O’Shanter and the Twelve Apostles in wax, and had especial care of the stuffed birds, giraffes, and alligators, was on most intimate terms with the cook.
The youngest of the ladies who hoped to die if they didn’t go ashore at the next landing and never went,—or died either, for that matter,—well, she was, or pretended to be, desperately in love with the treasurer of the company, a thin, irascible old fellow with a bald head. ”