Davie, had he but the means of securing access, would have walked in every night to the city to attend the playhouse; and it quite astonished him, he used to say, that I, who really knew something of the drama, and had four shillings a day, did not nightly at least devote one of the four to purchase perfect happiness and a seat in the shilling gallery. On some two, or at most three occasions, I did attend the playhouse, accompanied by Cha and a few of the other workmen; but though I had been greatly delighted, when a boy, by the acting of a company of strollers that had visited Cromarty, and converted the Council House Hall into a theatre, the greatly better acting of the Edinburgh company failed to satisfy me now. The few plays, however, which I saw enacted chanced to be of a rather mediocre character, and gave no scope for the exhibition of nice histrionic talent; nor were any of the great actors of the south on the Edinburgh boards at the time. The stage scenery, too, though quite fine enough of its kind, had, I found, altogether a different effect upon me from the one which it had been elaborated to produce. In perusing our fine old dramas, it was the truth of nature that the vividly-drawn scenes and figures, and the happily-portrayed characters, always suggested; whereas the painted canvas, and the respectable but yet too palpable acting, served but to unrealize what I saw, and to remind me that I was merely in a theatre. Further, I deemed it too large a price to devote a whole evening to see some play acted which, mayhap, as a composition I would not have deemed worth the reading; and so the temptation of play-going failed to tempt me; and latterly, when my comrades set out for the playhouse, I stayed at home. Whatever the nature of the process through which they have gone, a considerable proportion of the more intelligent mechanics of the present generation seem to have landed in conclusions similar to the one at which I at this time arrived. At least, for every dozen of the class that frequented the theatre thirty years ago, there is scarce one that frequents it now. I have said that the scenery of the stage made no very favourable impression upon me. Some parts of it must, however, have made a considerably stronger one than I could have supposed at the time. Fourteen years after, when the whole seemed to have passed out of memory, I was lying ill of small-pox, which, though a good deal modified apparently by the vaccination of a long anterior period, was accompanied by such a degree of fever, that for two days together one delirious image continued to succeed another in the troubled sensorium, as scene succeeds scene in the box of an itinerant showman. As is not uncommon, however, in such cases, though ill enough to be haunted by the images, I was yet well enough to know that they were idle unrealities, the mere effects of indisposition; and even sufficiently collected to take an interest in watching them as they arose, and in striving to determine whether they were linked together by the ordinary associative ties. I found, however, that they were wholly independent of each other. Curious to know whether the will exerted any power over them, I set myself to try whether I could not conjure up a death's-head as one of the series; but what rose instead was a cheerful parlour fire, bearing a-top a tea-kettle, and as the picture faded and then vanished, it was succeeded by a gorgeous cataract, in which the white foam, at first strongly relieved against the dark rock over which it fell, soon exhibited a deep tinge of sulphurous blue, and then came dashing down in one frightful sheet of blood. The great singularity of the vision served to freshen recollection, and I detected in the strange cataract every line and tint of the water-fall in the incantation scene in "Der Freischütz" which I had witnessed in the Theatre Royal of Edinburgh, with certainly no very particular interest, so long before. There are, I suspect, provinces in the philosophy of mind into which the metaphysicians have not yet entered. Of that accessible storehouse in which the memories of past events lie arranged and taped up, they appear to know a good deal; but of a mysterious cabinet of daguerrotype pictures, of which, though fast locked up on ordinary occasions, disease sometimes flings the door ajar, they seem to know nothing.