At last arrived the eagerly looked-for day of release from collegiate restrictions and labors.  I graduated, and the question, so momentous in the history of all adolescents, “What shall I be?” addressed itself seriously to my mind.  My father was desirous that I should choose medicine for a profession, and become the fourth physician, in lineal sequence, of my family on the paternal side.

Medicine.  I cavilled at it awhile, that I might bring out to view its grimmest and most discouraging aspect The cares, trials, humiliations of a young physician, his months and years of uncompensated drudgery, passed in awful review before me.  I thought of his toils among the poor and lowly, the vicious and depraved,—­of his broken sleep,—­the interruptions of his social ease,—­and then of the many scenes so repugnant to delicate nerves which he has to pass through,—­scenes of pain and insanity, of maimed and severed limbs, and all the eccentricities and fearful forms of disease.  These considerations pressed with such weight on my mind that for a time my ancestral craft was in danger of being ignominiously rejected by me.  Indeed, I began to think seriously of adopting a very different vocation.  And here I will make a confession, if the gentle reader will take it confidentially.

It is a familiar fact, that every college-boy has to pass through an attack of the rhyming frenzy as regularly as the child has to submit to measles and the whooping-cough.  A less frequent, but not less trying complaint, is that which manifests itself in a passion for the stage and in an espousal of the delusion that one was born for a great actor.  At any rate, this last was the type which my juvenile malaise-du-coeur finally assumed.

I have heard of a young gentleman who, whenever he was hard up for money, went to his nearest relatives and threatened them with the publication of a volume of his original poems.  This threat never failed to open the paternal purse.  I do not know what effect the intimation of my histrionic aspirations would have had; but one fine day I found myself on my way to Rochester, in the State of New York.

My role of dramatic characters was a very modest one for a beginner.  It embraced only Richelieu, Bertram, Brutus, Lear, Richard, Shylock, Sir Giles Overreach, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth.  My principal literary recreation for several years had been in studying these parts; and as I knew them by heart, I did not doubt that a few rehearsals would put me in possession of the requisite stage-business.  And yet my familiarity with the theatre was very limited.  I had never been behind the scenes.  Once, with a classmate, I had penetrated in the daytime to the stage of the old Federal-Street Theatre, and looked with awe on the boards formerly trodden by the elder Kean; but a growl from that august functionary, the prompter, sent us back in quick retreat, and I had never ventured again into those sacred precincts.