“The tall man with the gray hair at the temples is my colonel, Brandon,” he said.  “Very strict, but just to his men, and we like him.  He spent some years in the service of the East India Company, in one of the hottest parts of the peninsula.  That’s why he’s so brown, and it made his blood thin, too.  He can’t endure cold.  The officer with him is one of our majors, Apthorpe.  He has had less experience than the colonel, but thinks he knows more.  His opinion of the French is very poor.  Believes we ought to brush ’em aside with ease.”

“I hope you don’t think that way, Grosvenor,” said Robert.  “We in this country know that the French is one of the most valiant races the world has produced.”

“And so do most thinking Englishmen.  The only victories we boast much about are those we have won over the French, which shows that we consider them foes worthy of anybody’s steel.  But the play is going to begin, I believe.  The hall is well filled now, and I’m not trying to make an appeal to your local pride, Lennox, when I tell you ’tis an audience that will compare well with one at Drury Lane or Covent Garden for splendor, and for variety ’twill excel it.”

Robert was pleased secretly.  Although more identified with Albany than New York, he considered himself nevertheless one of the people who belonged to the city at the mouth of the Hudson, and he felt already its coming greatness.

“We call ourselves Englishmen,” he said modestly, “and we hope to achieve as much as the older Englishmen, our brethren across the seas.”

“Have you seen many plays, Lennox?”

“But few, and none by great actors like Mr. Hallam and Mrs. Douglas.  I suppose, Grosvenor, you’ve seen so many that they’re no novelty to you.”

“I can scarcely lay claim to being such a man about town as that.  I have seen plays, of course, and some by the great Master Will, and I do confess that the mock life I behold beyond the footlights often thrills me more than the real life I see this side of them.  Once, I witnessed this play ‘Richard III,’ which we are now about to see, and it stirred me so I could scarce contain myself, though some do say that our Shakespeare has made the hunchback king blacker than he really was.”

Presently a little bell rang, the curtain rolled up, and Robert passed into an enchanted land.  To vivid and imaginative youth the great style and action of Shakespeare make an irresistible appeal.  Robert had never seen one of the mighty bard’s plays before, and now he was in another world of romance and tragedy, suffused with poetry and he was held completely by the spell.  Shakespeare may have blackened the character of the hunchback, but Robert believed him absolutely.  To him Richard was exactly what the play made him.