“Ten cents, for instance?”

“Yes.”

I answered that I would never own to having come as low down as that; and I expressed a hardy and somewhat inconsistent doubt of the quality of the amusement that could be had for that money.  I questioned if anything intellectual could be had for it.

“What do you say to the ten-cent magazines?” my friend retorted.  “And do you pretend that the two-dollar drama is intellectual?”

I had to confess that it generally was not, and that this was part of my grief with it.

Then he said:  “I don’t contend that it is intellectual, but I say that it is often clever and charming at the ten-cent shows, just as it is less often clever and charming in the ten-cent magazines.  I think the average of propriety is rather higher than it is at the two-dollar theatres; and it is much more instructive at the ten-cent shows, if you come to that.  The other day,” said my friend, and in squaring himself comfortably in his chair and finding room for his elbow on the corner of my table he knocked off some books for review, “I went to a dime museum for an hour that I had between two appointments, and I must say that I never passed an hour’s time more agreeably.  In the curio hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it—­they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars’ caps and gowns—­there was not a great deal to see, I confess; but everything was very high-class.  There was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram.  There was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not interview; there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another.  On a platform at the end of the hall was an Australian family a good deal gloomier than the apes, who sat in the costume of our latitude, staring down the room with varying expressions all verging upon melancholy madness, and who gave me such a pang of compassion as I have seldom got from the tragedy of the two-dollar theatres.  They allowed me to come quite close up to them, and to feed my pity upon their wild dejection in exile without stint.  I couldn’t enter into conversation with them, and express my regret at finding them so far from their native boomerangs and kangaroos and pinetree grubs, but I know they felt my sympathy, it was so evident.  I didn’t see their performance, and I don’t know that they had any.  They may simply have been there ethnologically, but this was a good object, and the sight of their spiritual misery was alone worth the price of admission.

“After the inventor of the perpetual motion had brought his harangue to a close, we all went round to the dais where a lady in blue spectacles lectured us upon a fire-escape which she had invented, and operated a small model of it.  None of the events were so exciting that we could regret it when the chief lecturer announced that this was the end of the entertainment in the curio hall, and that now the performance in the theatre was about to begin.  He invited us to buy tickets at an additional charge of five, ten, or fifteen cents for the gallery, orchestra circle, or orchestra.