Vagabond Adventures

by Ralph Keeler

Finally I found myself, after some minor adventures, at Cincinnati, where the once notorious Mike Mitchell left the Campbell’s Minstrels and took me with him into a company which he organized there, under the title of “The Mitchells.” We played some time at the largest hall in Cincinnati, boarding the while at the Gibson House.

At this hotel I became acquainted with a chubby, handsome boy, about as tall as I was, who excited my admiration in an extraordinary manner. He would go to the theatre or some place of amusement every evening, and nevertheless get up at four or five o’clock every morning. I burned with a desire to wrestle with that boy.

This occurred to me as the only way to gratify my curiosity and establish a droll theory I had that any lad who could do with so little sleep must be a young giant. At last I inveigled him into my room, and the greater part of my remaining days in Cincinnati were spent in that cheerful and invigorating style of contest, to the no little damage of the furniture and our clothes, and of the nerves of a rheumatic old bachelor who occupied the apartment just under us.

There could have been nothing of the giant in the boy, after all, since we were so evenly matched. And, somehow, my belief in his wonderful sleeplessness was sadly dissipated. Whether he subsequently told me himself, or I found out by personal observation, I have forgotten; but I learned at last to account for his power of early rising in a way only less remarkable than the physical endurance of which I had thought him capable.

This young gentleman, it seems, was in the habit of going to sleep in his seat at the theatre, just after the overture by the orchestra. What struck me as particularly astonishing was that he always had the faculty of waking up when the dancing and comic songs came in, and especially when the broadsword and other combats took place. A tragedian never died to slow music in his presence but the young gentleman’s critical eye, refreshed and sharpened by recent repose, was upon him.

In a word, whatsoever the act or scene in which it occurred, my young friend was always “in at the death.” And he seemed to know by instinct, without consulting a ponderous gold watch which he carried, when it was time for the play to end.

Thus, it will be seen, he went away from the theatre with his night’s rest already half complete, and was able to arise at four or five the next morning and deliver to any chance comer throughout the day a reliable opinion on the best points made the evening previous by Jamison or Murdoch—the actors of those times—in the great scene wherein Macduff “lays on”; or this young gentleman could tell you, perhaps, the number of times the blades struck fire in the mighty broadsword battle, sustained single-handed against fearful odds, by Mrs. Wilkinson in the “French Spy.”

In the course of time our company started on its travels through the neighboring States, and when we returned to Cincinnati, my young friend and fellow-wrestler was gone; moved away with his parents from the hotel, I was told, and to another city.

Now what has made this reminiscence especially interesting, at least to me, was my next meeting with the subject of it, years and years afterward; because that was one of the strange occurrences which are, after all, about as frequent in an adventurous life as they are in fiction.

At a little inn in the shadow of the Odenwald, not far from the Rhine, I had the pleasure of taking him the next time by the hand. We have since passed many a day together on the Iser and Seine and Tiber, and we have slept many a night in the most uninviting of auberges and Gasthäuser; and not there, I am proud to say or in his hospitable mansion on Michigan Avenue, or, late at night, in the office of the great newspaper which he helps to edit, have I ever, in his generous manhood, discovered any sleeping on his post, or sleeplessness off from it.