But my wanderings were confined within a very
limited sphere. I hopped and fluttered, like a bird with a string
about its leg, gyrating round a small circumference, and keeping up a
restless activity to no purpose. Thus it was still in our familiar
Massachusetts--in one of its white country villages--that I must next
particularize an incident.
The scene was one of those lyceum halls, of which almost every
village has now its own, dedicated to that sober and pallid, or
rather drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the
lecture. Of late years this has come strangely into vogue, when the
natural tendency of things would seem to be to substitute lettered
for oral methods of addressing the public. But, in halls like this,
besides the winter course of lectures, there is a rich and varied
series of other exhibitions. Hither comes the ventriloquist, with
all his mysterious tongues; the thaumaturgist, too, with his
miraculous transformations of plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes
smoking in your hat, and his cellar of choice liquors represented in
one small bottle. Here, also, the itinerant professor instructs
separate classes of ladies and gentlemen in physiology, and
demonstrates his lessons by the aid of real skeletons, and manikins
in wax, from Paris. Here is to be heard the choir of Ethiopian
melodists, and to be seen the diorama of Moscow or Bunker Hill, or
the moving panorama of the Chinese wall. Here is displayed the
museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide catholicism of earthly
renown, by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the pope and the Mormon
prophet, kings, queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every sort
of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even the
most famous done in wax.
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