In mingling, therefore, among mountebanks and buffoons I was protected by the very vivacity of imagination which had led me among them.  I moved about enveloped, as it were, in a protecting delusion, which my fancy spread around me.  I assimilated to these people only as they struck me poetically; their whimsical ways and a certain picturesqueness in their mode of life entertained me; but I was neither amused nor corrupted by their vices.  In short, I mingled among them, as Prince Hal did among his graceless associates, merely to gratify my humor.

I did not investigate my motives in this manner, at the time, for I was too careless and thoughtless to reason about the matter; but I do so now, when I look back with trembling to think of the ordeal to which I unthinkingly exposed myself, and the manner in which I passed through it.  Nothing, I am convinced, but the poetical temperament, that hurried me into the scrape, brought me out of it without my becoming an arrant vagabond.

Full of the enjoyment of the moment, giddy with the wildness of animal spirits, so rapturous in a boy, I capered, I danced, I played a thousand fantastic tricks about the stage, in the villages in which we exhibited; and I was universally pronounced the most agreeable monster that had ever been seen in those parts.  My disappearance from school had awakened my father’s anxiety; for I one day heard a description of myself cried before the very booth in which I was exhibiting; with the offer of a reward for any intelligence of me.  I had no great scruple about letting my father suffer a little uneasiness on my account; it would punish him for past indifference, and would make him value me the more when he found me again.  I have wondered that some of my comrades did not recognize in me the stray sheep that was cried; but they were all, no doubt, occupied by their own concerns.  They were all laboring seriously in their antic vocations, for folly was a mere trade with the most of them, and they often grinned and capered with heavy hearts.  With me, on the contrary, it was all real.  I acted con amore, and rattled and laughed from the irrepressible gayety of my spirits.  It is true that, now and then, I started and looked grave on receiving a sudden thwack from the wooden sword of Harlequin, in the course of my gambols; as it brought to mind the birch of my school-master.  But I soon got accustomed to it; and bore all the cuffing, and kicking, and tumbling about, that form the practical wit of your itinerant pantomime, with a good humor that made me a prodigious favorite.

The country campaign of the troupe was soon at an end, and we set off for the metropolis, to perform at the fairs which are held in its vicinity.  The greater part of our theatrical property was sent on direct, to be in a state of preparation for the opening of the fairs; while a detachment of the company travelled slowly on, foraging among the villages.  I was amused with the desultory, hap-hazard kind of life we led; here to-day, and gone to-morrow.  Sometimes revelling in ale-houses; sometimes feasting under hedges in the green fields.  When audiences were crowded and business profitable, we fared well, and when otherwise, we fared scantily, and consoled ourselves with anticipations of the next day’s success.