FullReads

There was a large tent on the grounds for dramatical entertainments, with six performances a day, into which I was lured by a profusion of high- colored posters, and some such announcement, as that the beautiful serio- comic danseuse and world-renowned cloggist, Mile. Brown, would appear. About a dozen people were assembled within, and we waited a half-hour beyond the time announced for the curtain to rise, during which the spectacle of a young man in black broadcloth, eating a cocoa-nut with his pen-knife, had a strange and painful fascination. At the end of this half- hour, our number was increased to eighteen, when the orchestra appeared,– a snare-drummer and two buglers. These took their place at the back of the tent; the buglers, who were Germans, blew seriously and industriously at their horns; but the native-born citizen, who played the drum, beat it very much at random, and in the mean time smoked a cigar, while his humorous friend kept time upon his shoulders by striking him there with a cane. How long this might have lasted, I cannot tell; but, after another delay, I suddenly bethought me whether it were not better not to see Mile. Brown, after all? I rose, and stole softly out behind the rhythmic back of the drummer; and the world-renowned cloggist is to me at this moment only a beautiful dream,–an airy shape fashioned upon a hint supplied by the engraver of the posters.

What, then, did the public desire, if it would not smile upon the swings, or monsters, or dramatic amusements that had pleased so long? Was the music, as it floated out from the Coliseum, a sufficient delight? Or did the crowd, averse to the shows provided for it, crave something higher and more intellectual,–like, for example, a course of the Lowell Lectures? Its general expression had changed: it had no longer that entire gayety of the first day, but had taken on something of the sarcastic pathos with which we Americans bear most oppressive and fatiguing things as a good joke. The dust was blown about in clouds; and here and there, sitting upon the vacant steps that led up and down among the booths, were dejected and motionless men and women, passively gathering dust, and apparently awaiting burial under the accumulating sand,–the mute, melancholy sphinxes of the Jubilee, with their unsolved riddle, “Why did we come?” At intervals, the heavens shook out fierce, sudden showers of rain, that scattered the surging masses, and sent them flying impotently hither and thither for shelter where no shelter was, only to gather again, and move aimlessly and comfortlessly to and fro, like a lost child.

So the multitude roared within and without the Coliseum as I turned homeward; and yet I found it wandering with weary feet through the Garden, and the Common, and all the streets, and it dragged its innumerable aching legs with me to the railroad station, and, entering the train, stood up on them,–having paid for the tickets with which the companies professed to sell seats.

How still and cool and fresh it was at our suburban station, when the train, speeding away with a sardonic yell over the misery of the passengers yet standing up in it, left us to walk across the quiet fields and pleasant lanes to Benicia Street, through groups of little idyllic Irish boys playing base-ball, with milch-goats here and there pastorally cropping the herbage!

In this pleasant seclusion I let all Bunker Hill Day thunder by, with its cannons, and processions, and speeches, and patriotic musical uproar, hearing only through my open window the note of the birds singing in a leafy coliseum across the street, and making very fair music without an anvil among them. “Ah, signer!” said one of my doorstep acquaintance, who came next morning and played me Captain Jenks,–the new air he has had added to his instrument,–“never in my life, neither at Torino, nor at Milano, nor even at Genoa, never did I see such a crowd or hear such a noise, as at that Colosseo yesterday. The carriages, the horses, the feet! And the dust, O Dio mio! All those millions of people were as white as so many millers!”