[Illustration: BARNEY WILLIAMS IN DANDY JIM.] In 1850, when Edwin Booth was seventeen, and a year after his _debut_ as Tressel at the Boston Museum, he gave an entertainment with John S. Clarke, a youth of the same age, at the court-house in Belair, Maryland. They read selections from _Richelieu_ and _The Stranger_, as well as the quarrel scene from _Julius Caesar_, singing during the evening (with blackened faces) a number of negro melodies, "using appropriate dialogue"--as Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke records in the memoir of her brother--"and accompanying their vocal attempts with the somewhat inharmonious banjo and bones." Mrs. Clarke reprints the programme of this performance, and pictures the distress of the young tragedians when they discovered, on arriving in the town, that the simon-pure negro they had employed as an advance agent had in every instance posted their bills upsidedown. Mr. Booth, during his first San Francisco engagement, appeared more than once in the character of what was then termed a "Dandy Nigger;" and he remembers that his father, "some time in the forties," played Sam Johnson in _Bone Squash_ at the Front Street Theatre, Baltimore, for the benefit of an old theatrical acquaintance, and played it with great applause. Lawrence Barrett's negro parts, in the beginning of his career, were George Harris and Uncle Tom himself, in a dramatization of Mrs. Stowe's famous tale. [Illustration: RALPH KEELER.] Among the stage negroes of later years, whom the world is not accustomed to associate with that profession, Ralph Keeler is one of the most prominent. His "Three Years a Negro Minstrel," first published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1869, and afterwards elaborated in his _Vagabond Adventures_, is very entertaining and instructive reading, and gives an excellent idea of the wandering minstrel life of that period. He began his career at Toledo, Ohio, when he was not more than eleven years of age; and under the management of the celebrated Mr. Booker, the subject of the once famous song, "Meet Johnny Booker on the Bowling-green," he "danced 'Juba'" in small canton-flannel knee-breeches (familiarly known as pants) cheap lace, tarnished gold tinsel, a corked face, and a woolly wig, to the great gratification of the Toledans, who for several months, with pardonable pride, hailed him as their own particular infant phenomenon. At the close of his first engagement he received what was termed a "rousing benefit," the entire proceeds of which, as was the custom of the time, going into the pockets of his enterprising managers. During his short although distinguished professional life he was associated with such artists as "Frank" Lynch, "Mike" Mitchell, "Dave" Reed, and "Professor" Lowe, the balloonist, and he was even offered a position in E. P. Christy's company in New York--the highest compliment which could then be paid to budding talent. Keeler, a brilliant but eccentric writer, whose