It was after Aladdin had been in town that the fires burned hottest in us.  My grandfather and I went together to the matinee, his great thumb within my fist.  We were frequent companions.  Together we had sat on benches in the park and poked the gravel into patterns.  We went to Dime Museums.  Although his eyes had looked longer on the world than mine, we seemed of an equal age.

The theatre was empty as we entered.  We carried a bag of candy against a sudden appetite—­colt’s foot, a penny to the stick.  Here and there ushers were clapping down the seats, sounds to my fancy not unlike the first corn within a popper.  Somewhere aloft there must have been a roof, else the day would have spied in on us, yet it was lost in the gloom.  It was as though a thrifty owner had borrowed the dusky fabrics of the night to make his cover.  The curtain was indistinct, but we knew it to be the Stratford Church and we dimly saw its spire.

Now, on the opening of a door to the upper gallery, there was a scampering to get seats in front, speed being whetted by a long half hour of waiting on the stairs.  Ghostly, unbodied heads, like the luminous souls of lost mountaineers—­for this was the kind of fiction, got out of the Public Library, that had come last beneath my thumb—­ghostly heads looked down upon us across the gallery rail.

And now, if you will tip back your head like a paper-hanger—­whose Adam’s apple would seem to attest a life of sidereal contemplation—­you will see in the center of the murk above you a single point of light.  It is the spark that will ignite the great gas chandelier.  I strain my neck to the point of breaking.  My grandfather strains his too, for it is a game between us which shall announce the first spurting of the light.  At last!  We cry out together.  The spark catches the vent next to it.  It runs around the circle of glass pendants.  The whole blazes up.  The mountaineers come to life.  They lean forward on their elbows.

From the wings comes the tuning of the violins.  A flute ripples up and down in a care-free manner as though the villain Kazrac were already dead and virtue had come into its own.  The orchestra emerges from below.  Their calmness is but a pretense.  Having looked on such sights as lie behind the curtain, having trod such ways, they should be bubbling with excitement.  Yet observe the bass viol!  How sodden is his eye!  How sunken is his gaze!  With what dull routine he draws his bow, as though he knew naught but sleepy tunes!  If there be any genie in the place, as the program says, let him first stir this sad fellow from his melancholy!

We consult our programs.  The first scene is the magician’s cave where he plans his evil schemes.  The second is the Chinese city where he pretends to be Aladdin’s uncle.  And for myself, did a friendly old gentleman offer me lollypops and all-day-suckers—­for so did the glittering baubles present themselves across the footlights—­like Aladdin I, too, would not have squinted too closely on his claim.  Gladly I would have gone off with him on an all-day picnic toward the Chinese mountains.