to try to take the Latin prize. He did succeed in winning this prize, a handsome set of Plutarch's Lives, and when he carried the volumes home, his uncle took a five-dollar gold piece from his pocket and put it into the boy's hand. His first thought was to spend the whole of this in candy and raisins, and he went as fast as his feet could take him to his favorite resort, a little candy-booth kept by R. L. Stuart. Unfortunately, sulphur had just been weighed out in the scales, and the raisins had a strong taste of sulphur when they were handed to the lad. He was made so ill by this that he could not eat a raisin for years. R. L. Stuart was, fifty years after this time, one of the millionaires of New York.
Mrs. Smith heard Thomas say one day that he had never had as much pound-cake as he could eat. She made one for him, about the size of a grindstone, he used to say, and had it set before him when the dessert came on the table. "Now, Thomas," she said, "that cake is all for you." Thomas was cured of his fondness for pound-cake for the rest of his life by the very sight of this huge one, for he ate only a very small slice of it.
But the lively, gay boy was more fond of going to the theatre than of his Latin books. He spent nearly all his pocket-money in this way; and during the nine years that he was with his uncle he saw almost everything that was brought out on the New York stage. He went nearly every night, and the inexhaustible fund of amusing songs that were the delight of his children and grandchildren, and that are indelibly associated with him by his friends, who cannot recall them without a smile, were learned in this way.
After the horror of the burning of the Richmond Theatre the play-houses were not entered in New York by the public for some weeks. Every night the managers had their plays performed to houses absolutely empty. One night Thomas went to a theatre, and finding a man sitting there, stayed during the half of the play. But the situation of having all the actors and actresses looking at them, and going through their parts for
