midnight
Afterwards , the boy remembered nothing of the story , but a scrap of the dialogue meaninglessly remained with him ; and when the pirate captain appeared with his bloody crew and said , hoarsely , `` Let us go below and get some brandy ! '' the boy would have bartered all his hopes of bliss to have been that abandoned ruffian . In fact , he always liked , and longed to be , the villain , rather than any other person in the play , and he so glutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years at the theatre that he afterwards came to be very tired of it , and avoided the plays and novels that had very marked villains in them . He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night , and he lived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted , which was well on to midnight ; for in those days the theatre did not meanly put the public off with one play , but gave it a heartful and its money 's worth with three . On his first night my boy saw `` The Beacon of Death , '' `` Bombastes Furioso , '' and `` Black-eyed Susan , '' and he never afterwards saw less than three plays each night , and he never missed a night , as long as the theatre languished in the unfriendly air of that mainly Calvinistic community , where the theatre was regarded by most good people as the eighth of the seven deadly sins . The whole day long he dwelt in a dream of it that blotted out , or rather consumed with more effulgent brightness , all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before , and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like those villains on the stage , to have a moustache -- a black moustache -- such as they wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven , and somehow to end bloodily , murderously , as became a villain . I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of ten years ; but I do not defend it ; I only portray it .