When he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and I a schoolboy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys.

This blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones.

This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably.

He disappeared, and presently turned up in St.Louis.

I ran across him there, by and by.