While stopping in this delightful place I visited the small theatre of which the inhabitants are justly proud, and shall never forgive myself if I fail to mention the orchestra, that discoursed most eloquent music on that occasion.
Whether the regular musicians of the theatre were on a strike for higher wages, and the manager was obliged to bring in outside talent, I did not learn; but certain it was, the sole instrument that kept the audience awake between the acts, the night in question, was a large piece—a bassoon, I think—filled and manipulated by a stout, spectacled representative from the Faderland.
In addition to the musician’s frog-shaped body—which of itself would doubtless have attracted my attention—he had a head that was truly a study. To say he was bald, is to make a remark that would be applicable to about two-thirds of the gentlemen in the theatre, but to say that his head was as smooth, as shiny, and devoid of hair, from the eyebrows to the very nape of the neck, as a billiard ball, is hardly doing the head justice. It seemed actually peeled.
Besides, it was of a conical form, and as I looked upon it I thought what an advantage it would have been to me in my younger days if I had had some such thing in the barn-yard, over which to break pumpkins for the cattle. I am certain a pumpkin or squash brought down upon such an object with well-centred precision, would fly into as many fragments as the Turkish Empire.
I was not the only person whose attention was arrested by that marvelous development. If a diamond the size of a rutabaga had suddenly flashed, the audience would scarcely have turned with greater haste to contemplate its beauties than they did to regard that head the instant the hat was removed.
It had such a smooth and polished surface that the actors, as they passed back and forth upon the stage, were mirrored out upon it in Liliputian proportions. The large globe light was reflected so perfectly upon that glossy scalp that it shed a positive light to remote corners of the auditorium; and a person would look first at the head, then up at the globe, and then down at the head again, and _then_ hardly be prepared to decide from which object the original rays of light proceeded.