I first saw Looe it struck me as one of the oddest
old-world places in England. A man had been there
selling paper flags and coloured streamers also of
paper, and the children in the narrow alleys were
fluttering these, and had hung them from the
windows, and were dancing with coloured paper
caps on their heads or harlequin sashes about their
bodies, whilst an Italian organ-grinder played to
them. From the narrow casements leaned their
mothers, watching, laughing, and encouraging the
dancers. A little way back was a booth theatre,
hardly up to the level of that of Mr. Vincent
Crummel's, enclosed in dingy green canvas. Re-
served seats, 6d.; back seats, 3d. and 1d. The
répertoire comprised blood-curdling tragedies. I
went in and saw "The Midnight Assassin; or, The
Dumb Witness."
Next evening was to be given "The Vampire's Feast; or, The Rifled Tomb." The tragedy was followed by Allingham's play, "Fortune's Frolick" (1799), adapted to the narrow capacities of the company. It was performed in broad Cornish, and interspersed with some rather good and, I fancy, original songs. But surely nowhere else but at Looe could such a reminiscence of the old strolling company-show of fifty or sixty years ago be seen.
But this is not all. A stranger having seen something I wrote about puppet-shows in a paper, wherein I said that the last I had sat through was sixty years ago, wrote to me:—
"At West Looe, far more recently, at the annual fair, which commences on the 6th May, I saw a show in which
