d Mrs. J.W. Wallack, Jr.
Upon the powers and peculiarities of those actors, and upon the traits
of many others who, like them, are dead and gone (for there is scarcely
a word in the book about any of his living contemporaries), he comments
freely and instructively. He was "barn-storming" in Texas when the
Mexican war began, and he followed in the track of the American army,
and acted in the old Spanish theatre in Matamoras, in the spring of
1846; and, subsequently, finding that this did no good, he opened a
stall there for the sale of coffee and other refreshments, in the corner
of a gambling hell. He calls to mind the way of domestic life and the
every-day aspect of houses, gardens, people, and manners in Matamoras,
and those he describes with especial skill--deftly introducing the
portraiture of a dusky, black-eyed, volatile Mexican girl, to whom he
lost, temporarily, the light heart of youth, and whom he thinks that he
might have married had he not deemed it prudent to journey northward
toward a cooler clime. In New Orleans, at about that time, he first saw
the then young comedian John E. Owens: and he records the fact that his
ambition to excel as an actor was awakened by the spectacle of that
rival's success. Owens has had his career since then,--and a brilliant
one it was,--and now he sleeps in peace.

After that experience Jefferson repaired to Philadelphia, and during the
next ten years, from 1846 to 1856, he wrought in that city and in New
York, Baltimore, Richmond, and other places, sometimes as a stock actor,
sometimes as a star, and sometimes as a manager. He encountered various
difficulties. He took a few serious steps and many comic ones. He was
brought into contact with some individuals that were eminent and with
some that were ludicrous. He crossed the Allegheny mountains in
mid-winter, from Wheeling to Cumberland, in a cold stage-coach, and
almost perished. He was a member of Burton's company at the Arch Street
theatre, Philadelphia, and was one of the chorus in that great actor's
revival of _Antigone_--which there is little doubt that the chorus
extinguished. He was the low comedian in Joseph Foster's amphitheatre,
where he sang _Captain Kidd_ to fill up the "carpenter scenes," and
where he sported amid the turbulent rhetorical billows of _Timour the
Tartar_ and _The Terror of the Road_. He acted in New York at the
Franklin theatre and also at the Chatham. He managed theatres in Macon
and Savannah, whe