B. Booth's company
of strolling players, and to continue a while longer to glimmer behind
the footlights in the hands of his famous son.
Observing that the grave-digger in his too eager realism was damaging
the thing--the marks of his pick and spade are visible on the
cranium--Edwin Booth presently replaced it with a papier-mache
counterfeit manufactured in the property-room of the theatre. During
his subsequent wanderings in Australia and California, he carefully
preserved the relic, which finally found repose on the bracket in
question.
How often have I sat, of an afternoon, in that front room on the fourth
floor of the clubhouse in Gramercy Park, watching the winter or summer
twilight gradually softening and blurring the sharp outline of the skull
until it vanished uncannily into the gloom! Edwin Booth had forgotten,
if ever he knew, the name of the man; but I had no need of it in order
to establish acquaintance with poor Yorick. In this association I was
conscious of a deep tinge of sentiment on my own part, a circumstance
not without its queerness, considering how very distant the acquaintance
really was.
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