opened his playhouse and made a good deal of money.

The young lawyer's name was Abraham Lincoln!

Tennessee proved an unlucky State for the Jeffersons. At Memphis there
had been a money panic, and people had no heart for theaters. Joe's
father had always known how to paint scenery, and now he advertised to
paint signs, but did not get many orders. Joe heard that a law was
passed that all carts, drays, and carriages in the city of Memphis must
bear numbers. He went to the mayor's house and rang the bell. "Please,
Mr. Mayor," he said, "I'm Joe Jefferson's son."

"Oh, yes, my boy; I've seen both you and your father on the stage."

"Well, Sir, my father can paint signs as well as act, and now that the
theaters are closed he is glad of outside work. Couldn't you please give
him the contract to paint the numbers on your city carriages?"

The mayor's eyes twinkled. He was pleased with the business-like way of
the boy and granted his request. The money from this work was a help,
and right after that a rich man hired Joe's father to paint Scottish
scenes on the walls of his reception hall, so they were getting on quite
comfortably when poor Mr. Jefferson was taken ill and died. This meant
that Joe and his sister must leave school and go to work. Mrs. Jefferson
opened a boarding-house, and the two children joined a traveling
theatrical company. They did fancy dancing and sang comic duets, and
ever so many times when they pretended to laugh, they were so tired and
homesick that they wanted to cry. Sometimes Joe would be given a few
lines to speak in some play. It seemed as if he would never get a chance
to show what talent he really had. But he studied all his spare time and
watched great actors carefully, because he intended to win a high place
on the stage some day.

By and by Laura Keene, an actress who had a theater of her own in New
York, let him try a leading character in a play that ran one hundred and
fifty nights. There was not one of these performances at which the
audience did not applaud young Joe Jefferson and say they wanted to see
him in something else. And when they did see him in Dickens's _Cricket
on the Hearth_, as dear old Caleb Plummer, and as Bob Acres in _The
Rivals_, they exclaimed: "This young man is a wonder! Why, he knows the
whole art of acting!" But Joe Jefferson did not think he knew half
enough. He kept on studying for he meant to improve still more.

Finally, after he had become quite famous