Excerpt from Recollections of Travels Abroad My dear Brookfield, It gives me great pleasure to dedicate this book to you, because your name is associated with reminiscences that cannot be made public on account of their private nature, and for affections that would lose their charm if they were shared by others. I shall never forget the extemporized dramas that were played in your youth, in which the dramatis personœ were numerous, and the players few, for they included only your brother Arthur and yourself. Those of us who were admitted to the gallery know well enough where the future comedian was born; but I believe I was the only one who prophesied his coming. Of course people in the private boxes had better knowledge, and were therefore not among the prophets. The other day, as I was dining at a nickel restaurant in a back street off Broadway, in the modern city of New York, a man, who guessed that I was an Englishman, asked me if I knew Mrs. Brookfield. I was greatly surprised by this question; not only or account of the lowliness of the house in which I was, but by the obvious obscurity of the person who put it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.