Vagabond Adventures

by Ralph Keeler

From these towns where we had dancing-parties I always went away with love-affairs on my hands. The amount of gold rings which I exchanged with young ladies between the ages of eleven and thirteen years was, to say the least, extraordinary.

Sunday in a small city is generally a heavy day with your minstrel. He writes to his wife, if he has any, or, if he has none, he practises solos on the bass-viol or some other instrument that ought never to be played solo, or yawns or lounges about the common room of the company. I used to pass these days, I am sorry to say, in replying to voluminous, ill-spelt correspondence from young persons with whom I had danced, a week or so back; and if I happened to have a flame in the same town, I would go to church with the very reprehensible motive of seeing her, or walking home with her.

I ought to have known that this was highly improper conduct, even if the simple appearance of a negro-minstrel at church had not almost invariably produced great scandal to the congregation. I am glad, however, to be able to add that my toilet and behavior in such places were always scrupulously careful.

I do not know whether it is quite seemly in me to tell of it, but during the past winter I had occasion to lecture in a town which had once been the scene of one of these erotic exploits; and there were sitting in a row on a front seat in the audience not only the quondam heroine and the gentleman who has for many years been her husband, but her father and mother, and, worst of all, that brother of hers who intercepted our letters and who had threatened profanely to “punch” my “head.” Now, although our attachment had been of the most harmlessly juvenile kind, the reader will imagine my embarrassment when I had the honor of an introduction to this whole family, and when the past was talked over by them in the most ruthlessly philosophical manner.

At a certain county-seat in Michigan the “Booker Troupe” had a remarkable bout with a moral editor. There must be many persons in that county, especially of the legal fraternity, who yet remember at least the catastrophe of the strange affair. This is the way it happened, as nearly as I can recall it:—

There were two weekly papers published in that town at the time. Our agent had given our advertisement to one of these papers, and the other without authority had copied it. When the bills were brought to be paid, that of the paper which had printed our advertisement without warrant was about three times as much as the regular price, or as the other paper had charged. To Mr. Booker’s remonstrance it was answered that the exorbitant bill must be paid, that shows were immoral things anyway, and that it was the purpose of that particular weekly newspaper to put them down. This was the moral editor who spoke.

Mr. Booker offered him the same amount that the other paper had charged, and bluntly refused to give a cent more. The moral editor would not take a cent less than his first charges, and, in default of immediate payment, would get out an attachment.

Now the constable, in common with most of the citizens, sympathized with Mr. Booker. In fact, the red nose and generally dissipated air of the moral editor made decidedly against the honesty of his intentions as a missionary of reform. And thus it happened, by some intentional delay in the making out of the papers, that the constable and the creditor arrived at the station to attach our baggage just at the time when it was all carefully stowed away in the baggage-car, and when the train was moving off with us on board.

The editor in great rage, notwithstanding his mission as moral censor, indulged in a great deal of profanity, by way of making it the better understood that he would follow us to the ends of the earth,—as soon as he could get the proper warrant made out.

Our next stopping-place was a brisk little town which chanced to be in the same county. We exhibited there and slipped away to our next point on a midnight train, leaving Mr. Booker behind to encounter the attachment, which, from private advices, we were led to expect the following morning. The officer accosted Mr. Booker as he was getting on the train, and asked him if an old weather-beaten valise which he carried in his hand was his. It was; and that was all the baggage he had with him, the rest having gone on, of course, with us by the night train.