"
A skull is an object that always invokes interest more or less poignant;
it always has its pathetic story, whether told or untold; but this skull
is especially a skull "with a past."
In the early forties, while playing an engagement somewhere in the wild
West, Junius Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a particularly
undeserving fellow, the name of him unknown to us. The man, as it
seemed, was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer, and highwayman--in
brief, a miscellaneous desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sort
of person likely to touch the sympathies of the half-mad player. In the
course of nature or the law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodily
disappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist even as a reminiscence in
the florid mind of his sometime benefactor.
As the elder Booth was seated at breakfast one morning in a hotel in
Louisville, Kentucky, a negro boy entered the room bearing a small osier
basket neatly covered with a snowy napkin. It had the general appearance
of a basket of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as such it
figured for a moment in Mr.
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