There had been three or four plays founded on this story, but
Jefferson says that none of them were good. His father and his
half-brother had acted the part before him, but nothing that he
remembered gave him any hope that he could make a good play out of
existing material. He therefore went to work to construct a play for
himself, and his story of how he did it, told in two pages of his
book, and with the most unconscious air in the world, reveals the
whole secret of Jefferson's acting: its humor and pathos subtly
mingled, its deep humanity, its pure poetry--the assemblage of
qualities, in fine, that make it the most perfect as well as the most
original product of the American stage.

Yet the play, even in the form he gave it, did not satisfy him, nor
did it make the impression in America that he desired. It was not
until five years later that Dion Boucicault, in London, remade it for
Jefferson; and it was in that city it first saw the light in its new
form, September 5, 1865. It was at once successful, and had a run of
one hundred and seventy-five nights.

With his Asa Trenchard and his Rip van Winkle will ever be associated
in the loving memory of play-goers his Bob Acres in Sheridan's
"Rivals," thought by many to be his capital part--a personification
where all the foibles of the would-be man-of-the-world: his
self-conceit, his brag, his cowardice, are transformed into virtues
and captivate our hearts, dissolved in the brimming humor which yet
never overflows the just measure, so degenerating into farce.

Between the two productions of Rip van Winkle in New York and in
London, Jefferson had had many strange experiences. His wife died in
1861, and he broke up his household in New York, and leaving three of
his children at school in that city, he left home with his eldest son
and went to California. After acting in San Francisco, he sailed for
Australia, where he was warmly received; thence went to the other
British colonies in that region, touched on his return at Lima and
Callao and Panama, at which place he took a sailing-packet for London,
and after his great success in that city returned to America in 1866.
In 1867 he married, in Chicago, Miss Sarah Warren, and since that time
his life has flowed on in an even stream, happy in all its relations,
private and public, crowned with honors, not of a gaudy or brilliant
kind, but solid and enduring. His art is henceforth part and parcel of
the rich treasure of the Am