After having sung" Pretty Deary," or "Barney leave the Girls alone," favorites at that time I used to feel sentimental twitches of the heart, as their merry, sparkling eyes met mine, with the hearty laugh and applause which followed these private performances.

On one occasion, a young lady was standing in a room; as I entered, and met the gaze of her dark eyes, I found the power of speech had left me. I could not, by any means, address her with the most common phrases of civility.

Affection had often coquetted with me. I had felt tender at parting with divers Susans, Charlottes, Marias and Harriets, but this encounter had, in an instant, driven all these buxom country lasses from the storehouse which I had began to fill with the material, thought by the young and enthusiastic to be only parted with when existence itself is to end.

Even at the hazard of spoiling the story of my wooing, by anticipating its results, let me confess that I was in love, suddenly, irrecoverably, with a stranger maiden, who is now the wife of my hopes, and firm friend in adversity and prosperity, and to whom I am much indebted for the success and happiness that I enjoy.

Before this meets your eye, kind reader, we may both "sleep the sleep that knows no waking."

Falling in

Courtships are, in the main, alike. love at first sight was the error of my parents and has been the destructive fall of many a couple of human beings, and will be through all time.

Yet the two individuals, in whose welfare the writer feels the most profound interest, fell, at this time, from the mutual contagion which involved them, into the dis

temper, as it has been called by those whose experience in its pathology is entitled to regard, and for which neither time, nor the medicine of varied fortune has proposed a cure.

At length my silence was broken, and we separated with the interchange of civility and friendly greeting.

It will serve no purpose to be particular in the preliminary proceedings which resulted in mutual confidence and engagement of marriage-on the condition. that I should leave off acting. This was a terrible sacrifice; yet I submitted, in order to obtain the hand of my chosen one. * Her friends objected, and forbade me, on any account, to visit the house. We, however, continued to correspond, and our plans were sufficiently sane to baffle all the "lynx-eyed vigilance" of family connexions, busy neighbors, and rival suitors, until our letters were intercepted. This caused a strict watch over my intended, and strong anathemas against myself. As soon as I heard the news, I shut up shop in Rochester, and turned my face towards the town of L, full of love, indignation, and determination. What happened there shall be the subject of another chapter, when I can find the leisure, and my inclination will serve to transcribe it.

* It will be understood that Mr. Hill had retired from the profession of a stage player, and was, at this time, doing business on his own account in Rochester.

CHAPTER VI.

"And then the lover."

"A horse—a horse-my kingdom for a horse!"

MY ELOPEMENT AND MARRIAGE.

SOME one has said that a life of any person who has been actively engaged in the business of the world for forty years, written or unwritten, must contain incidents instructive, in a greater or less degree, to such persons as may have the knowledge of them.

This saying will apply with more force to the lives of great captains on land or at sea-politicians, lawyers, physicians, pirates, house-breakers, and others, who have excelled in their peculiar vocations-legal or illegal-and whose eminence at court, or on the gallows, have entitled them to biographies, intended to show the steps upon which they ascended the platform of glory, and gained the extreme point of their notoriety.

I did not specify actors in the list; but the reader will of course consider them included in the general collection represented by the significant word, "others."

There is a propriety in leaving them from the list of any assemblage of professions and trades, the members. of which have furnished their representative man to the gallows, as a finish to their lives.

It is a fact, that no actor has ever been executed for crime. This truth is an argument of some weight in favor of the professional stage-player. I cannot say but

some of them may have deserved the penalty; but I do say, that no crime has been proved against an actor to render him a subject for execution upon the scaffold.

I am about to trace the incidents immediately connected with one of the most important events of my life—my marriage.

In some respects, it was brought about not unlike a preceding family affair in which I was interested. At the time of my engaging in the preliminaries, I was ig norant of the similarity. I allude to a subject noticed in an early chapter-the marriage of my father and my mother. Love at first sight was the stimulant of both; but the arranging of their compact was not disturbed by any opposing cannonades from parental batteries-the prying manoeuvres of aunts and cousins-piques of old maids, or disappointed bachelors. The particulars

of the ceremony are lost to the world; the repositories of this important detail were guests, in the form of friends and relatives, whose memories are damaged by the confusion of things forgotten, things present, and things to come.

But the accidents by flood and field, attendant upon my own entree into married life, are fresh in my memory, as to-day's salutation of an esteemed friend; and, by a strange coincidence, this is the very anniversary of my wedding day.

There are many scenes of actual adventure, as well as the imagined situation of imaginary heroes and heroines, which have become fixed things by the power of the pencil in the hands of the great masters, ancient and modern.

I shall not descend to catalogue making. Betrothals,

marriages, coronations, elopements, have been selected as subjects worthy to live forever on the canvass, which has received the oil and earths, the salts of metals, mixed by the hand of genius extempore, as the mind directed the work.

If I had the skill of an artist, I would illustrate my journey to the clergyman, with the doings by the way, and my journey from his place of business, in panoramic style.

This may not be, from my failure, at an earlier day, to become instructed in the elements of the art of painting.

"Words, words, words," are my reliance. My palette must be supplied with such colors as the dictionary furnishes; my brush-an erratic moving pen-set in motion by the impulsive thoughts of the self-historian, who is to portray scenes in which he is the hero; and, in order to realize with all the force of recognition most necessary to "point the moral or adorn the tale," the reader must cultivate intimate acquaintance with imaginative speculation, as he attends the progress of my wedding jaunt.

To those who have seen me in the Green Mountain Boy, I need not give a description of the bridegroom of that bridal.

I wore no striped frock; but, with rather a juvenile face, and, in costume, somewhat in advance of my years, I bristled about, making preparations for the great business of marriage, with a determination little. less than that of Napoleon when crossing the Alps on a very different mission.

To avoid suspicion, we arranged, at our last inter