ng, and she decided to open a boarding-house for actors, while
Joseph and his sister earned a small stipend by variety work in the
theatre.

More years of hardship followed--the trio of mother and children
wandering over the country, south and west: in Mississippi and Mexico,
seeing life in all its phases of ill luck and disappointment, with
faint gleams of success here and there, but meeting all with a spirit
of such cheerful bravery as makes the darkest experience yield a
pleasure in the telling. Surely, it might soften the heart of the
sourest enemy of the stage to read the spirit in which this family met
the long-continued crosses of their professional life.

[Illustration: Joe Jefferson as Bob Acres.]

Joseph Jefferson tells the story of his career so modestly, that it is
hard to discover just when it was that success first began to turn a
smiling face upon his efforts. Yet it would seem as if, for himself,
the day broke when he created the part of Asa Trenchard in "Our
American Cousin." He says that up to 1858, when he acted that part, he
had been always more or less a "legitimate" actor, that is, one who
has his place with others in a stock company, and never thinks of
himself as an individual and single attraction--a star, as it is
called. While engaged with this part, it suddenly occurred to him that
in acting Asa Trenchard he had, for the first time in his life on the
stage, spoken a pathetic speech; up to that time all with him had been
pure comedy. Now he had found a part in which he could move his
audience to tears as well as smiles. This was to him a delightful
discovery, and he looked about for a new part in which he could repeat
the experiment. One day in summer, as he lay in the loft of a barn
reading in a book he well calls delightful, Pierre Irving's "Life and
Letters of Washington Irving," he learned that the great writer had
seen him act the part of Goldfinch, in Holcroft's "Road to Ruin," and
that he reminded him of his grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, "in look,
gesture, size, and make." Naturally pleased to find himself
remembered and written of by such a man, he lay musing on the
compliment, when the "Sketch Book" and the story of Rip van Winkle
came suddenly into his mind. "There was to me," he writes, "magic in
the sound of the name as I repeated it. Why was not this the very
character I wanted? An American story by an American author was surely
just the thing suited to an American actor."