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broke up his Boston home. This "royal couch of Denmark," as they came to call it, now dominates one of the guest rooms at the Aldrich home on Mt. Vernon Street, Boston.

The letter is dated November 17, 1891, and was written from the Players' Club, which Booth had founded in Gramercy Park, and where, in the third-floor rooms reserved for his use, he passed the final years of his life.

"Dear Tom," it begins, "Bless thee! Thy wink was timely wunk and made me merry! Sweet be thy slumbers in thy royal bed, for I s'pose you'll try at least a nap in it but be careful how you tumble out of it; remember my adventure with your four poster in your room of state one dark night, long ago, when dear old Tripp howled to greet me, and now he's canine-ized. ... Hope you'll soon be here to have a chat through our pipes. I'm still pretty much of a weakling but in better condition than I've been for many months. Shall be glad to see Tal [Aldrich's son, Talbot]. Love to all. Am anxiously waiting news from Florence. He was lately chosen for Barrett's place on the board of directors. Adieux! Yours forever,

EDWIN."

William Winter, who has written a tender and beautiful "Life" of Booth, and who was his dear friend, says that it was their intention to write together in the Players' Club, with the aid of its library, a history of the theatre in America. Owing to various circumstances the plan miscarried. But what a book that would have been!

The sweet patience which had always been a marked

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quality of Booth's character did not fail him when sickness and suffering fell to his lot. He died on July 8, 1893, full, as he had lived, of happy belief in a world beyond the grave. He was laid at rest, beside the wife of his youth, in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the poet, who, with Charles P. Daly, Horace Howard Furness, Joseph Jefferson, A. M. Palmer, William Bispham, and Eastman Johnson, acted as pallbearer wrote to Winter that when Booth's coffin was lowered into the grave the sun went down." It has not since come up. No American actor since Booth has been able to move and stir audiences as his Hamlet stirred them. Perhaps the reason lies in that closeness of association between Edwin Booth and Hamlet the Dane, of which Henry Austin Clapp has spoken in his "Reminiscences," an association "which will abide as long as the man and his art and life are remembered. For in largeness and sweetness, in rare delicacy and sensibility, Booth was nobly human to the core, after the pattern of the most human of all the creations of the poet. Like the melancholy prince, he was required to drink the bitter water of affliction, and to hold his peace when his heart was almost breaking; and, in its extraordinary depth and reserve, his soul, even as Hamlet's and Milton's

"Was like a star, and dwelt apart.'

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CHAPTER XIV

SOME OF BOOTH'S MORE DISTINGUISHED CONTEMPORARIES

WHAT Booth was to tragedy in this country Joseph Jefferson was to comedy. Like Booth, he came of a well-known actor-family; like Booth, he had the highest respect for his art; and again like Booth - he was a scholar and a gentleman. Jefferson has very pleasantly told his life story in his delightful " Autobiography," a book which no lover of the stage should fail to read. Yet since it would be absurd to write at all of the American theatre without giving some sketch of its most gifted comedian, it behooves me here to record that Rip Van Winkle Jefferson began his active life on the "boards" at the age of four, by being dumped from a paper bag carried by Thomas D. Rice, who was impersonating an eccentric and agile negro and who sang this couplet:

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'd have yer for to know,

I'se got a little darkey here, to jump Jim Crow."

Whereupon both the man and the diminutive lad, who was dressed exactly like him, danced the dance and sang the song that are remembered to this day.

From this beginning, Jefferson served his apprentice

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