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VAGABOND ADVENTURES.
VAGABOND ADVENTURES.
BY RALPH KEELER. BOSTON: FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 1870. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, BY RALPH KEELER, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge. TO My old Friend EDWARD P. BASSETT, Esq. , This book is affectionately inscribed, with the wish, which is hardly a hope, that the public may take my Life half as easily and good-naturedly as he takes his own. R. K. ...
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CHAPTER I. PREFATORY.
CHAPTER I. PREFATORY.
I T is an odd sort of fortune to have lived an out-of-the-way or adventurous life. There is always a temptation to tell of it, and not always a reasonable surety that others share the interest in it of the conteur himself. It would, indeed, be a nice problem in the descriptive geometry of narrative to determine the exact point where the lines of the two interests meet,—that of the narrator and that of the people who have to endure the narration. I cannot say that I ever hope to solve this proble
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CHAPTER II. FAMILY MATTERS.
CHAPTER II. FAMILY MATTERS.
I T may be laid down as a general principle, to start with, that a boy had better not run away from home. Good and pious reasons are not wanting, and might be here adduced, in substantiation of this general principle. Some trite moralizing might be done just now, in a grave statement that an urchin needs not run away into the world after its troubles, since they will come running to him soon enough, and that a home is the last fortress weary men build (and oftentimes place in their wives’ names)
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CHAPTER III. A FUGITIVE.
CHAPTER III. A FUGITIVE.
E SCAPING from the house at night, I did not have time or presence of mind to take anything with me but what I carried on my back. One of my school-fellows, who had been forewarned of my design, met me by appointment on the neighboring corner, and smuggled me into his father’s stable. Here, it had been agreed, I was to lodge on the hay. My friend was a doughty, reassuring sort of hero, who was a great comfort to me at that nervous moment when I entered the darkness of the hay-mow. I would not fo
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CHAPTER IV. A STORMY TIME.
CHAPTER IV. A STORMY TIME.
D ESERTING entirely the haunts of my play-fellows, I stole down to the wharves. Here the sight of the crowded shipping brought back, more strongly than ever, the memory of that exhilarating trip on the old Indiana, with her sublime brass-band and warlike sheet-iron Indian; and I tried to “hire out” on a steamboat. The people to whom I made application eyed me suspiciously, for I was very small of my age. They also asked me a great many disagreeable questions, and generally ended by advising me t
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CHAPTER V. A BOY’S PARADISE.
CHAPTER V. A BOY’S PARADISE.
N EAR the end of a quiet street we alighted at a little frame-house, all embowered in peach and plum trees. This was the steward’s home, and soon was as much mine as if I held the title-deed. They had no children, and the steward’s wife was not long in growing wonderfully fond of me,—so fond, indeed, that she humored me in everything. When tired of the house and little yard, I amused myself in strolling alone to the lake and taking amateur voyages in the fishermen’s boats, without their permissi
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CHAPTER VI. THE CONTUMELY OF CAPTAINS.
CHAPTER VI. THE CONTUMELY OF CAPTAINS.
T HE captain of the steamer Diamond, never in the habit of looking pleased at anything, did not depart from his habit, but rather carried it to an unwonted degree of frowning and darkling excess, when he saw me at work again about the table, at the next meal after leaving Conneaut. He said nothing to me, however, but, calling up the steward, had a long, stormy talk with him. The steward in self-defence was, of course, obliged to tell how I had stowed myself away in the forecastle, which, I need
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CHAPTER VII. ALMOST A TRAGEDY.
CHAPTER VII. ALMOST A TRAGEDY.
A S soon as the Baltic was made fast, and the captain had sufficiently recovered from his astonishment, he stalked toward me, denouncing vengeance. I took to my heels as soon as he reached the wharf. Finding that he could not catch me, he stopped, shook his fist, and swore he would arrest me if he saw or heard anything more of me. I, of course, knew nothing of the law but its terrors, and, though I really had the better side in the case, gave the matter up. It may have been that the joy to be in
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CHAPTER VIII. TAKEN PRISONER.
CHAPTER VIII. TAKEN PRISONER.
A RISING refreshed, I sallied forth early on the wharf to amuse myself. In the course of an hour it occurred to me suddenly—out of no more previous thought or care about the matter than I had had the night before on the subject of a lodging—that I had had no breakfast, and could not say exactly where I was going to get any. The good-natured face of my late bedfellow again suggested itself to my mind, and I returned to the sand-scow. There he was in the little coop of a cabin, just partaking of h
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CHAPTER IX. SQUALOR.
CHAPTER IX. SQUALOR.
W ANDERING about for what seemed a long while, turning from one thoroughfare into another, so as to make pursuit uncertain, it finally crossed my mind that it was past my bedtime. Fear had driven away my hunger so completely that I thought no more of it till the next day. Brushing and rubbing as much of the coal-dust from my clothes as I could, I now walked boldly up to the counter of the Commercial Hotel, and said that I wanted to see the head-porter. The clerk eyed me curiously as he asked me
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CHAPTER X. A FINAL TRIUMPH.
CHAPTER X. A FINAL TRIUMPH.
A RRIVED safely at Buffalo, I did not look much like the urchin who had left there several months before. Although I had conscientiously washed my solitary piece of linen every week, and tried to keep myself as neatly as I could, my clothes were greasy and ragged and my boots nearly off my feet. I wandered about the wharves without any purpose that I can now remember, and might have been very disconsolate if it were not for the joy I felt at escaping from the danger which I considered so imminen
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CHAPTER I. MY FIRST COMPANY.
CHAPTER I. MY FIRST COMPANY.
N EGRO-MINSTRELS were, I think, more highly esteemed at the time of which I am about to write than they are now; at least, I thought more of them then, both as individuals and as ministers to public amusement, than I ever have since. The first troupe of the kind I saw was the old “Kunkels,” and I can convey no idea of the pleasurable thrill I felt at the banjo-solo and the plantation-jig. I resolved on the spot to be a negro-minstrel. Mr. Ford, in whose theatre President Lincoln was assassinated
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CHAPTER II. I BECOME A BENEFICIARY.
CHAPTER II. I BECOME A BENEFICIARY.
I T may as well be owned that I had no natural aptness for the banjo, and was always an indifferent player; but for dancing I had, I am confident, such a remarkable gift as few have ever had. Up to this day, I do not think I ever have seen a step done by man or woman that I could not do as soon as I saw it,—not saying, of course, how gracefully. I am not, however, so vain or proud of this gift as I used to be, and should hardly have written the foregoing sentence at all, had it not seemed necess
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CHAPTER III. THE FATE OF THE SERENADERS.
CHAPTER III. THE FATE OF THE SERENADERS.
W E now started on our travels, staying from one night to a week in a city, according to its size, stopping always at the best hotels, and leading the merriest of lives generally. I had the additional glory of being stared at as the youthful prodigy by day, and of having more than my share of applause, accompanied sometimes with quarter-dollars, bestowed on me at night. There are probably many who will yet remember to have seen their cities thoroughly posted and plastered with the glaring announ
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CHAPTER IV. THE TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS OF THE “BOOKER TROUPE.”
CHAPTER IV. THE TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS OF THE “BOOKER TROUPE.”
T HE two gentlemen with whom I left Pittsburg accompanied me to Toledo, where Mr. Booker set to work to get up another company. It was not long till we heard of Lynch at Cincinnati in search of an engagement, and he was accordingly sent for. Mr. Edwin Deaves, also a member of the defunct “Serenaders,”—and now, by the way, a gray-haired wood-engraver and scenic artist at San Francisco,—was brought from some other place, and the “Booker Troupe” set out on its travels. This company prided itself on
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CHAPTER V. THE LAST OF THE “BOOKER TROUPE.”
CHAPTER V. THE LAST OF THE “BOOKER TROUPE.”
I N the course of time the “Booker Troupe” was disbanded, and Ephraim, as well as ourselves, was, in green-room parlance, out of an engagement. I never saw him or Lynch afterward. Mr. Edwin Deaves, as I have intimated, is an industrious maker of wood-cuts and painter of transparencies and theatrical illusions in San Francisco. He was the gentlemanly “middle man” and barytone of this company. I never met him professionally after our disbanding. He went to California, I believe, with the late Samu
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CHAPTER VI. “THE MITCHELLS.”
CHAPTER VI. “THE MITCHELLS.”
D URING the time I was waiting for another engagement I wandered to a large Western city, and took board in a respectable private family. There were three unmarried daughters in this household, the youngest of whom could not, I think, have been less than twenty-six years old. Notwithstanding the disparity of our ages, my memory is very much at fault if I was not in love with all three of these ladies at once. Nothing else, at least, could account to me now for the regularity with which I conduct
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CHAPTER VII. ON THE FLOATING PALACE.
CHAPTER VII. ON THE FLOATING PALACE.
T HE day after the farewell benefit of Mitchell I was engaged by Dr. Spaulding, the veteran manager, whose old quarrel with Dan Rice has made him famous to the lovers of the circus. He was then fitting out the Floating Palace for its voyage on the Western and Southern rivers. The Floating Palace was a great boat built expressly for show purposes. It was towed from place to place by a steamer called the James Raymond. The Palace contained a museum with all the usual concomitants of “Invisible Lad
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CHAPTER VIII. WILD LIFE.
CHAPTER VIII. WILD LIFE.
I OBTAINED my first view of the great Mississippi and of the practical working of Lynch law at the same time. The night of our advent at Cairo was lit up by the fires of an execution. A negro, it seems, was the owner or lessee of an old wharf-boat, which had been moored to the levee of that town, and which he had turned to the uses of a gambling-saloon. People who had been enticed into it had never been seen or heard of afterward. The vigilance committee, then governing Cairo, had frequently end
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CHAPTER IX. THE PERFORMER SOCIALLY.
CHAPTER IX. THE PERFORMER SOCIALLY.
I N his social relations a performer, like many another great man or woman, is liable to mistakes of head and heart. It is a pretty generally known fact, for instance, that the most famous tenor of our day is so careful of his gloves as to fly into a towering rage with any lady who touches them with more than her finger-tips, in the most impassioned duets. And a very celebrated prima donna who takes the world captive as much by the exceeding loveliness of her person and manner as by her wonderfu
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CHAPTER X. ADIEU TO THE STAGE.
CHAPTER X. ADIEU TO THE STAGE.
G OING up the Mississippi from Cairo, we passed, one Sunday, the old French town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and its Roman Catholic college on the river-bank. The boys were out on the lawn under the trees, and I became as envious of their lot as I ever had been before of a man who worked on a steamboat or who danced “in the minstrels.” I suddenly resolved that I would go to that college. We did not stop at Cape Girardeau till our return down the river, some weeks afterward. Then I went boldly u
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CHAPTER I. STARTING ON A CATTLE-TRAIN.
CHAPTER I. STARTING ON A CATTLE-TRAIN.
I CANNOT tell when the idea of going abroad first came into my mind, but, in a little journal kept in my thirteenth year while travelling with the minstrels, I find the fact that I was going to Europe alluded to as a matter of which there was not the shadow of a doubt. There is a jolly sort of beggar in San Francisco who says hope is worth twenty-five dollars a month. It must be that I shared with him his principal income during the four years of college life which almost immediately succeeded m
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CHAPTER II. TAKING TO EUROPEAN WAYS.
CHAPTER II. TAKING TO EUROPEAN WAYS.
A T New York I found that I should be obliged to pay 130 for exchange on my money. This I did, after buying a through third-class ticket to London for thirty-three dollars in currency. 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, w
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CHAPTER III. STUDENT LIFE AND WANDERINGS.
CHAPTER III. STUDENT LIFE AND WANDERINGS.
B UT I must get back to Heidelberg, where the sympathetic reader will not, I trust, have imagined that I went all this time without dinners because the search for one which should be the ultima Thule of cheapness was embarrassing and adventurous. I found a place, at last, where a homely abundant midday meal was furnished me in a private family, for one gulden and twenty-six kreutzers per week,—a fraction over eight cents a day. My supper I took at a Gasthaus , in company with some theological st
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CHAPTER IV. A FIGHT WITH FAMINE.
CHAPTER IV. A FIGHT WITH FAMINE.
I N the mean time, the condition of my finances was becoming hourly more desperate. I had written to innumerable American newspapers, offering to produce a letter a day for five dollars a week, and making all sorts of struggling tenders of brain-work, from which, as a general rule, I heard nothing at all. At last Christmas came, and found me back at Heidelberg, utterly penniless; over five thousand miles from home, in a country where for a stranger to obtain work was simply hopeless; since the b
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CHAPTER V. THE CONCLUSION.
CHAPTER V. THE CONCLUSION.
I STAYED at Florence all winter, living on the cheapest of food, indeed, but with the very best of company. I haunted the galleries and studios so much that the artists took me for a devotee of art, and never asked me how I lived. At dusk it was my custom to steal away toward my dinner, passing Michael Angelo’s David, forever about to throw the stone across the famous old Piazza, and gliding down a by-street till I came to the market. There, in a little cook-shop, amid the filth and noise of the
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