AN OCCASIONAL PROLOGUE by MR. WALL
to which will be added a FARCE,
MISS IN HER TEENS

* * * * *

“Boxes:  One Dollar:  Pit Five Shillings:  Galleries 9d.  Doors to be
open at Half-past Four, and will begin at Six o’clock.

“No persons can be admitted without Tickets, which may be had at
the coffee House in Baltimore, and at Lindlay’s Coffee House on
Fells-Point.

“No Persons will on any pretence be admitted behind the Scenes.”

This last sentence was indeed a necessary one; for during the earlier days of the American theatre many in the audience frequently invaded the stage, either to congratulate the actors or to express in fistic combat their disgust over the play or the acting.  It was not uncommon, too, for eggs to be thrown from the gallery, and both this and the rushing upon the stage was expressly forbidden at length by the authorities of several towns.  Every class in colonial days seems to have found its own peculiar way of enjoying itself, whether by fascinating through beauty and brilliance the supposedly sophisticated French dukes, or by pelting barn-storming actors with eggs and other missiles.

The limits of one volume force us to omit many an interesting social feature of colonial days, especially of the cities.  How much might be said of the tavern life of New York City and the vicinity, how much of those famous resorts, Vauxhall and Ranelagh, where many a device to arouse the wonder of the fashionable guests was invented and constructed!  Then, too, much might be related about the popular “fish dinners” of New York and Annapolis, the horse races in Virginia and Maryland, the militia parades and pageants at Charleston.  But sufficient has been offered to prove that the prevalent idea of a dreary atmosphere that lasted throughout the entire colonial period is false; certainly during the eighteenth century at least, the average American colonist obtained as much pleasure out of life as the rushing, ever-busy American of our own day.

XVI.  Strange Customs in Louisiana

It should be noted that most of these pleasures were in the main healthful and normal, and, in the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon colonists at least, made a most commendable contrast to the recreations indulged in by the French colonists of Louisiana.  There can be but little doubt that during the last years of the eighteenth century moral conditions in this far southern colony might have been far better.  Although Louis XIV, the Grand Monarch, had been dead practically a century, he had left as a heritage a passion for pleasure and merry-making that was causing the French nobility to revel in profligacy and vice.  It must be admitted that many of the French colonists in America were apt pupils of their European relatives, while the Creole population, born of at least an unmoral union, was, to say the least, in no wise a hindrance to pleasures of a rather lax character.  Then, too, there was the negro, or more accurately the mulatto, who if he or, again more accurately, she had any moral scruples, had little opportunity as a slave or servant to exercise them.