Admired the easy and graceful drapery painted on the "drop," which looks as if it was whittled out of a pine shingle--took a perplexed view of the assorted landscape depicted thereon--endeavored to reconcile the Turkish ruins with the Swiss mountains, or the Gothic castle with the Arab slaves--wanted to harmonize the camels and other tropical quadrupeds on the right, with the frozen mill-pond on the left--couldn't understand why the man on the other side of the same, among the distant mountains, should be so much larger than the individual close to the shore, who is supposed to be nearer by several miles.
Tried to make out what the man in a turban is doing with his legs crossed under him, on a raft, but gave it up--admired exceedingly the two rows of private boxes, which looked like windows in a martin-house, but could not perceive the propriety of having them supported by plaster of paris ladies, without any arms, and their bodies covered up in patent metallic burial-cases. (I was informed that the artist calls them _Caryàtides_.)
Was impressed with the admirable proportions of the stage; a hundred and eleven feet wide, by four feet ten inches deep--reminded me forcibly of an empty seidlitz-powder box, turned up edgeways--censured the indelicacy of the managers in permitting the immodest little cupids, who tacitly perform on the impossible lutes and fiddles, to appear before so refined an audience, "all in their bare"--(my friend says the drapery was "omitted by particular request.")
Was much chagrined about a mistake I made concerning a picture on one of the proscenium flats, which I mistook for a Kentucky backwoods girl, with a bowie-knife in one hand and a glass of corn-whiskey in the other; but I was told that it represents the tragic muse, with the dagger and poison bowl.
Resolved not to be deceived about the match picture on the other side, and after an attentive scrutiny, I determined that it is either a female rag-picker with a scoop-shovel, or a Virginia wench with a hoe-cake in her hand; and I made up my mind that any one disposed to heathenism might safely worship the same, and transgress no scriptural command, for it certainly is a likeness of "nothing in the heavens above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth." Many other barbaric attempts at ornamentation claimed my attention, and would have received particular notice, had I not perceived by the stir in front of the stage that the performance was about to commence.