Charles B. Parsons,
who afterward acted in many theatres as Rip, and ultimately became a
preacher, was, on that night, the performer of Derrick. Jefferson's
predecessors as Rip Van Winkle were remarkably clever men--Flynn,
Parsons, Burke, Chapman, Hackett, Yates, and William Isherwood. But it
remained for Jefferson to do with that character what no one else had
ever thought of doing--to lift it above the level of the tipsy rustic
and make it the poetical type of the drifting and dreaming
vagrant--half-haunted, half-inspired, a child of the trees and the
clouds. Jefferson records that he was lying on the hay in a barn in
Paradise Valley, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1859, taking advantage
of a rainy day to read Washington Irving's _Life and Letters_, when that
plan came to him. It proved an inspiration of happiness to thousands of
people all over the world. The comedian made a play for himself, on the
basis of Charles Burke's play, but with one vital improvement--he
arranged the text and business of the supernatural scene so that Rip
only should speak, while the ghosts should remain silent. That stroke of
genius accomplished his object. The man capable of that exploit in
dramatic art could not fail to win the world, because he would at once
fascinate its imagination while touching its heart.

In 1861 Jefferson went to California and thence to Australia, and in the
latter country he remained four years. He has written a fine description
of the entrance to the harbour at Sydney. His accounts of "the skeleton
dance," as he saw it performed by the black natives of that land; of his
meeting with the haunted hermit in the woods; of the convict audience at
Tasmania, for whom he acted in _The Ticket-of-Leave Man_; and of the
entertainment furnished in a Chinese theatre, are compositions that
would impart to any book the interest of adventure and the zest of
novelty. Such pictures as those have a broad background; they are not
circumscribed within the proscenium frame. The man is seen in those
passages as well as the actor; and he plays his part well, amid
picturesque surroundings of evil and peril, of tragedy and of pathos. In
Australia Jefferson met Charles Kean and his wife (Ellen Tree), of whom
his sketches are boldly drawn and his memories are pleasant. Mr. and
Mrs. Kean afterward made their farewell visit to the United States,
beginning, when they reached New York (from San Francisco, in April
1865), with _Henry VIII._,