Dear Joe Jefferson—­actor, painter, courteous gentleman, profound student of Shakespeare!  When the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy was raging in America (it really did rage there!) Jefferson wrote the most delicious doggerel about it.  He ridiculed, and his ridicule killed the Bacon enthusiasts all the more dead because it was barbed with erudition.

He said that when I first came into the box to see him as “Rip” he thought I did not like him, because I fidgeted and rustled and moved my place, as is my wicked way.  “But I’ll get her, and I’ll hold her,” he said to himself.  I was held indeed—­enthralled.

In manner Jefferson was a little like Norman Forbes-Robertson.  Perhaps that was why the two took such a fancy to each other.  When Norman was walking with Jefferson one day, some one who met them said: 

“Your son?”

“No,” said Jefferson, “but I wish he were!  The young man has such good manners!”

Our first American tours were in 1883 and 1884; the third in 1887-88, the year of the great blizzard.  Henry fetched us at half-past ten in the morning!  His hotel was near the theater where we were to play at night.  He said the weather was stormy, and we had better make for his hotel while there was time!  The German actor Ludwig Barnay was to open in New York that night, but the blizzard affected his nerves to such an extent that he did not appear at all, and returned to Germany directly the weather improved!

Most of the theaters closed for three days, but we remained open, although there was a famine in the town and the streets were impassable.  The cold was intense.  Henry sent Walter out to buy some violets for Barnay, and when he brought them in to the dressing room—­he had only carried them a few yards—­they were frozen so hard that they could have been chipped with a hammer!

We rang up on “Faust” three-quarters of an hour late!  This was not bad considering all things.  Although the house was sold out, there was hardly any audience, and only a harp and two violins in the orchestra.  Discipline was so strong in the Lyceum company that every member of it reached the theater by eight o’clock, although some of them had had to walk from Brooklyn Bridge.

The Mayor of New York and his daughter managed to reach their box somehow.  Then we thought it was time to begin.  Some members of Daly’s company, including John Drew, came in, and a few friends.  It was the oddest, scantiest audience!  But the enthusiasm was terrific!

Five years went by before we visited America again.  Five years in a country of rapid changes is a long time, long enough for friends to forget!  But they didn’t forget.  This time we made new friends, too, in the Far West.  We went to San Francisco, among other places.  We attended part of a performance at the Chinese theater.  Oh, those rows of impenetrable faces gazing at the stage with their long, shining, inexpressive eyes!  What a look of the everlasting the Chinese have!  “We have been before you—­we shall be after you,” they seem to say.